If there’s anything to be gleaned from A Haunting in Venice, it’s that Kenneth Branagh should make more horror movies. His quasi-notorious allegiance to cinematic trickery – lopsided Dutch angles, unusual POVs, and frenetically edited sequences – has often felt out of step with the subjects depicted on screen. It proved a distraction from the glossy adventures of Marvel’s Thor, the domesticity of Belfast, and the elegant logic of his previous Agatha Christie adaptations: 2017’s Murder on the Orient Express and last year’s Death on the Nile.
But, for his third film based on Christie’s Poirot novels, Branagh has turned his attention to one of the author’s lesser-known stories, Hallowe’en Party. Its humdrum, English hamlet locale has been swapped for the fog-choked canals of Venice, and a crumbling palazzo with death in its walls. As it turns out, it’s fairly unsurprising that an artist with roots in the illusionist, symbolic world of Shakespearean theatre, who’s already adapted Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, would turn in a capable, classic chiller that’s actually quite scary when it needs to be. Finally, all of his gimmicks have found their home.
