A Haunting in Venice (2023)

User Review

• 

  Barneyonmovies

  7 / 10

  WHAT I LIKED: The previous Poirot movies are much of a pulpy muchness, but 'A Haunting in Venice,' infuses horror into the usual whodunit formula to properly keep you on the edge of your seat.
  
  Rather than just being about finding a murderer, the central mystery is also about that age-old horror question of whether something demonic is behind things. It all kicks off when Poirot (Kenneth Branagh) is dragged by a friend (Tina Fey) to a seance at a supposedly Haunted Venetian Palazzo where a medium (Michelle Yeoh) is trying to contact the spirit of the owner's dead daughter. He doesn't believe in anything to do with ghosts or spirits and starts unraveling the tricks of the whole charade and the more logical explanation for the girl's death. But people soon start dying in the Palazzo, and as he witnesses more and more unexplainable things, he and we start to question whether something spiritual really is behind all of this after all.
  
  The way Branagh directs his film also adds brilliantly to the unease. The opening shots show a cold Venice filled with crows, and the establishing shots of the house are brilliantly shadowy and Gothic. When they're there, we get numerous jump-scares, brilliantly creepy sound-design full of creaks and voices, and classic horror set-ups where some inevitable scare is teased from the moment you see a certain prop or set-up.
  
  WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE: In all the focus on teasing the spiritual horror, the unravelling of the more logical mystery is underdeveloped, so it feels pretty perfunctory once Poirot inevitably debunks it all.
  
  VERDICT: 'A Haunting in Venice,' is a brilliantly mysterious whodunit that gets you to question whether something demonic could be behind its many deaths.

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