As most readers know, I’m a big fan of Agatha Christie’s Belgium sleuth Hercule Poirot. The books are amazing, and the TV show with David Suchet is also great. Older movies with actors like Peter Ustinov also capture the fastidious genius of the Queen Of Crime’s world-renowned detective.
The most recent adaptation of Poirot has been created by Kenneth Branagh, and I’m not convinced that they are in the spirit of the original books. Someone on the production staff has clearly read Christie’s works: there are references to the characters in obscure novels, such as the reference to the main character in Dumb Witness, and some call backs to classic characteristics that make the detective character so instantly recognisable.
However, in general, the depiction in the films is very different to the original character that Christie created. The first two books that Branagh adapted, Murder On The Orient Express and Death On The Nile, are very famous novels that many people have heard of. The third film in the series, A Haunting In Venice, is based on a less popular novel The Halloween Party.
The reason for the name change is apparent in the first few minutes: the film is much more loosely based on the original novel than the previous films. While some of the character names are the same, and there is a Halloween party, that’s about where the similarities end.
In fact, the start of the film reminded me of The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd, as Poirot is now retired from detective work and growing vegetables in a quiet home. Instead of a small English village, as Christie had it, Branagh moves Poirot’s retirement to a stunning apartment in Venice, where he is kept safe from potential clients by an Italian bodyguard.
One day, his bodyguard informs him that a woman has arrived, and left the only clue to her identity in the form of an apple. Poirot, and anyone who has ever read a novel with the character in it, know that this is the introduction of Ariadne Oliver. The fictional novelist was Christie’s self portrait in fiction, and was a very funny character in past adaptations and books. In this film, Tina Fey plays her not as a wacky writer with good instincts about people, but as a cynical American who feels she invented Poirot: something that never occurs in the books.
The novelist claims to be convinced by a spiritual medium named Joyce Reynolds: instead of a young girl bobbing for apples and claiming to have seen a murder, she’s played by Michelle Yeoh, who has stunning hair in the film and players her character with a haughty cynicism as she tries to convince Poirot that she’s a legitimate medium. She claims to be able to talk to the dead, and is hosting a seance at the home of an opera singer who’s daughter went mad and ended up killing herself after her fiancé left her.
The former fiancé is invited to the event, as are friends of the opera singer and members of her household, and the assistants of the medium, so there are plenty of suspects. Quickly, a murder occurs, and Poirot instigates a lock down of the house to create a locked room scenario: which literally occurs later in the film. All the actors in the film perform their parts to a T, and the scenes and wardrobe departments did an amazing job of creating a glorious setting for this beautifully-shot film. The one that lets the film down is among the most important elements: the dialogue.
Some of the writing is so atrocious it’s actually funny. Poirot actually says to Joyce Reynolds: ‘I am here to divine your divinations’. What does that even mean? Then there are some of the insults and bits that are clearly meant to be witticisms, but just fall flat. A child is described as ‘as charming as chewing on tin foil’, while the boy’s father is called a ‘twitch salad’. Both phrases and others used throughout the film are clunky and frankly, just a bit weird.
At times, the dialogue in the film is so repetitive, that I’m pretty sure ChatGPT had a hand in it! The only section that feels like real, human-written dialogue is the final speech, where Poirot unmasks the killer. That speech you can tell was written by a person: the rest seems very stilted and strange.
The actors do their best to deliver the lines with straight faces, but their valiant efforts don’t mask the fact that the dialogue is something that no real person would ever say. It’s a vague approximation of real conversation, but written in a way that suggests whoever put the script together didn’t actually know how real humans speak. That’s why I reckon some form of generative AI had a hand in the script: if that’s the case, it’s clear that Hollywood needs to focus on real writers, not digital tools. Tech can be used to save time in many different ways with great results, but writing scripts is not one of them.
Overall, A Haunting In Venice was a decent film let down by poor dialogue. Like Murder On The Orient Express and Death On The Nile before it, it’s just not a Poirot film. With a different name and main character, it’d be great, but it doesn’t have the tension or ingenuity of the true Queen Of Crime’s work on which it’s supposed to be based.
The Dorset Book Detective 