A Haunting in Venice (Spoilers)

Kenneth Branagh returns in his third movie as Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot. In this installment, Poirot is in retirement in Venice. He even has his own bodyguard to protect him from the pesky public. Only one penetrates Poirot’s solitude (besides the pastry man): Adriadne Oliver, his famous author friend who persuades him to come to a Halloween séance with her. Poirot does not believe in seances, indeed anything beyond what he can here and see. So he is very skeptical of this medium, Joyce Reynolds. The medium would be communicating with a young woman named Alicia who had committed suicide in that house a year before.

Several people attend the séance. The deceased (Alicia’s) mother, Rowena, Alicia’s ex-fiance Maxime, the housekeeper Olga, the family doctor, his young son and Reynold’s assistant.. On the surface it looks like Reynolds is a fraud. She has one of her assistants concealed in the chimney during the séance to help make it seem more real. But then a very strange “episode” occurs in which Joyce Reynolds accuses someone in the room of murder….and the medium turns up dead.

I liked this movie, but I wasn’t sure if it was good. Unlike the other two movies, I did not know how it was going to end. It was adapted from Christie’s story “The Halloween Party” but Branagh made changes to the plot. It also is the first to adapt supernatural elements like ghosts and phantom voices which adds a whole other dimension. Poirot thinks he is losing his mind.

But he isn’t going crazy. In what I thought was a clever twist, Poirot was merely being drugged to keep him off his game. And it almost worked. But he figured it out with the little gray cells nonetheless. Rowena, Alicia’s mother, was poisoning her to keep her weak, feeble, infantile so she couldn’t leave. In a case of accidental overdose, Alicia is murdered and her mother cruelly throws her to her death to make it look like suicide. Honestly, not as farfetched as the other plots. If you are a fan of Kenneth Branagh and Hercule Poirot, I would make a recommendation. Otherwise, I think you can wait until this movie hits streaming.