BEFORE: Wow, another confluence, Easter Sunday was just a day before April Fool's Day, how do I work with that? Simple, especially if this movie is (as I suspect) about false mediums and phony seances, that seems like it's going to fit in just fine. I had this on the horror list, but it doesn't really connect to anything there, and I don't want it to just sit on that list for years while I avoid watching it.
I worked at a screening of this film at the theater, back in early September of last year - the strike was still going on, so no stars from this film were permitted by their union to attend and promote it, so instead Disney took over the whole lobby and had a whole seance set-up going on in the green room, guests could put on masks and have their photo taken and celebrate Halloween early, plus free popcorn for everyone, to make up for no stars being there, I guess.
So it seems only appropriate that I watch the film at the same theater, just not on the big screen, but on Hulu on the computer in the office during a particularly long, boring shift where the larger theater is being used to hold background actors for an episode of "Law & Order: SVU" that is filming down the block. I got to have breakfast from the catering truck, which was a breakfast burrito and some home fries, so thanks for that, Law & Order: CSU (Craft Services Unit)
Kelly Reilly carries over from "Calvary".
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Murder on the Orient Express" (Movie #2,901), "Death on the Nile" (Movie #4,245)
THE PLOT: In post-World War II Venice, Poirot, now retired and living in his own exile, reluctantly attends a seance. But when one of the guests is murdered, it is up to the former detective to once again uncover the killer.
AFTER: Yeah, so I didn't get to meet Kenneth Branagh in September, that's OK because I'd already met him at a screening of "Belfast" during the pandemic. He was live in person at a guild screening to answer questions about the film, and I got to cue him to go on stage, that was the extent of our interaction. I'll take it. Judi Dench was there virtually via zoom call, which got posted on the movie screen. You just never know who's going to show up there, I've got a much longer list of celebrities that I've had interactions with than I had three years ago.
All things considered, seven months isn't that much of a response time, between that screening and me actually WATCHING today's film - for me that's pretty good, it's better than having a film taking up space on my movie DVR for three years or even longer. Plus there must be a few films on my list that have been there for longer than that, perhaps there are some films that I'll never get around to watching, either because I just don't care to, or they're very difficult to link to. I can watch any movie I want, but sometimes it works the other way around, and I end up wanting to watch the movies that I can, if that makes any sense. But since I haven't encountered any spoilers for "A Haunting in Venice", I may as well strike while the iron is hot, before I read some article where the identity of the murderer is revealed, and then there's little point in tuning in.
The film takes place on Halloween (DAMN it!) in Venice, Italy in 1947. The world was still recovering from World War II, and for the franchise it's a BIG leap forward of 13 years, both previous films were set in 1934, one just after the other. You don't HAVE to have seen the two earlier films starring Kenneth Branagh as Hercule Poirot, but it sure couldn't hurt, either. All three films are based on Agatha Christie novels, and all feature a group of people who are stuck together in one place (a train, a riverboat, a palazzo on the Venice canals) when a murder is committed. They're not infamous "locked-room" mysteries, but they're all perhaps close to that. Poirot has to interview the suspects separately and determine who among them is the killer (or killers) based on the evidence and also what he knows about the world.
The debate Poirot has with his friend, murder mystery writer Ariadne Oliver, is over whether mediums or spiritualists are real, because if they are, then ghosts are real and therefore there is an afterlife, and therefore there is a heaven and a God. However Poirot has seen enough of the world to not believe in such things, or perhaps it's that he has never seen a medium or spiritualist who wasn't using trickery and/or effects to make people believe in a connection to the spirit world. It makes sense, any detective would look for rational reasons to explain what are seemingly supernatural events. Also, he has lost whatever faith he once had in God and also humanity - he's seen too much in 13 years, apparently, only we don't know exactly what.
Ms. Oliver has belief in the medium, Joyce Reynolds, who is about to conduct a seance in the Venetian home of opera singer Rowena Drake, whose daughter died in the building a year ago, apparently by suicide after her fiancé ended their engagement, she fell into the canal - or was it murder, or was she attacked by ghosts? The palazzo has a terrible history of being a former orphanage in which children were locked up there during a city-wide plague and abandoned to die there, and rumors claim the building is haunted by the spirits of those children, who have a vendetta against all doctors and nurses. Wouldn't you know it, the medium served as a nurse during World War II, and another guest is a former army doctor who is suffering from PTSD, or battle fatigue, or shell shock (depending which decade you grew up in.)
Poirot sits through the seance, during which Joyce Reynolds appears to spin wildly around in her chair and channel the spirit of Alicia Drake, who accuses one person at the seance of being her murderer, though conveniently she doesn't single out that person. Poirot easily exposes the assistants to the medium, who are concealed in the room to operate the "magic typewriter", however there's much more to unravel when someone is impaled on a statue afterwards, at which point the entire building is locked down so no one can leave. Which they couldn't anyway, not without a boat or swimming away through the city's canals. And during Poirot's interviews a second guest becomes dead, so he realizes that he'd better hurry, before long it's going to be just him and the murderer. (Case closed at that point, I guess.)
All he's got to go on are the underground chamber (who knew that buildings in Venice even HAD basements?) a hidden telephone and a mysterious jar of honey in the linen closet. Damn, that's not much, how do they add up to a murder plot or some kind of conspiracy? And is it possible that one or two of Poirot's friends are in on it, for their own benefit? If only Poirot hadn't suffered that head injury and started seeing hallucinations of the dead Alicia, he might be able to put it all together...
No spoilers here, because it's so much better when you don't know the ending in advance. That was my main problem with the 2017 "Murder on the Orient Express", that I had already seen the movie version made in 1974, I think I'd seen the 1978 "Death on the Nile" too at one point, but thankfully I had forgotten the solution to the mystery - so these last two films with Branagh as Poirot have been more enjoyable than the first once, because I've been able to be surprised. I hope they make more films in this franchise, but I'm just not sure if they will. Ariadne Oliver, as you might imagine, is a character from Agatha Christie's novels that she based on herself, and there's no reason why she can't return in another movie. They don't have to remake "Evil Under the Sun", there are at least 40 other Poirot novels they could choose from - so why not? I don't want to read too much about them on Wikipedia, as I'd still rather be suprised.
Also starring Kenneth Branagh (last seen in "Conspiracy"), Kyle Allen (last seen in "West Side Story" (2021)), Camille Cottin (last seen in "Stillwater"), Jamie Dornan (last seen in "Heart of Stone"), Tina Fey (last seen in "Betty White: First Lady of Television"), Jude Hill (last seen in "Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves"), Ali Khan (last seen in "The School for Good and Evil"), MIchelle Yeoh (ditto), Emma Laird, Riccardo Scarmarcio (last seen in "Effie Gray"), Rowan Robinson, Amir El-Masry (last seen in "Rosewater"), Vanessa Ifediora (last seen in "Belfast"), Dylan Corbett-Bader, Fernando Piloni, David Menkin (last heard in "Ron's Gone Wrong"), Esther Rae Tillotson, Winnie Soldi.
RATING: 7 out of 10 shadow puppets
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