I have just seen Kenneth Branagh’s A Haunting in Venice, his third film based on an Agatha Christie mystery featuring her recurrent detective Hercule Poirot, this one on a late and relatively minor novel called Halloween from 1969, almost exactly 50 years after Poirot’s first appearance in a novel of 1920. I have not read the novel, but an online summary makes clear that the film has almost no resemblance to the original story beyond the fact that a character is murdered by being drowned while bobbing for apples at a Halloween party. The rest is an original creation of Branagh and his screenwriter Michael Green. What they have created is fascinating, both in its own right and in the fact that it is united, not in plot but in thematic preoccupations, to Branagh’s two prior Poirot films in a kind of loose trilogy. Beneath the entertaining surface of these films lie depths that the reviews I have read seem at most dimly aware of and do not explore.
October 27, 2023
October 27, 2023
October 27, 2023
I have just seen Kenneth Branagh’s A Haunting in Venice, his third film based on an Agatha Christie mystery featuring her recurrent detective Hercule Poirot, this one on a late and relatively minor novel called Halloween from 1969, almost exactly 50 years after Poirot’s first appearance in a novel of 1920. I have not read the novel, but an online summary makes clear that the film has almost no resemblance to the original story beyond the fact that a character is murdered by being drowned while bobbing for apples at a Halloween party. The rest is an original creation of Branagh and his screenwriter Michael Green. What they have created is fascinating, both in its own right and in the fact that it is united, not in plot but in thematic preoccupations, to Branagh’s two prior Poirot films in a kind of loose trilogy. Beneath the entertaining surface of these films lie depths that the reviews I have read seem at most dimly aware of and do not explore.