A Haunting In The Venice review- Has little to offer in terms of fright.
Rating: 2.5/5 Suyog Zore
'A Haunting In Venice' begins with a magnificent mesmerising image of this beautiful town where our now retired and disconnected from the world but still extremely famous Detective is resting. He's also hired a bodyguard to keep him safe from all the people queuing outside his house, each with their own fresh mystery to solve. Despite his reservations to solve any mysteries, Poirot undertakes to attend a seance at the request of a famous mystery writer Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey) in order to solve the mystery of a suicide of a heartbroken mother Rowena (Kelly Reilly)'s now dead daughter. In this palazzo, they also have a company of Rowena's housekeeper, a doctor dealing with his mental health with his young kid, a woman claiming to contact with the dead, her assistant, and possibly a few ghosts?
Much of the film is set in a single location, and Michael Green, who previously worked with Branagh on two prior Christie adaptations, adapts this horror- themed narrative to the screen. Sadly, this third adaptation, like the previous two, fails to adequately transmit the complexity and dread of the narrative onto the screen and provide the audience with a good disturbing murder mystery. Of course, expecting filmmakers to always deliver something extraordinary and come up with extremely unique, never seen before plot twists is unrealistic, but what matters is how you present this plot twist and manage to convince the viewers to remain completely engaged and believe in this predictable or unpredictable plot twist and therein lies it's biggest drawback.
Despite impeccable production attributes, the audience doesn't feel the dread of this whole terrifying scenario. In fact in some scenes, this whole scenario of this place being haunted by ghosts almost starts feeling comical. Both screenwriter Michael Green and director Kenneth Branagh failed to give each character unique character atributes, and those that did have some unique decent character atributes nearly feel cartoonish. The film also fails to connect you with the mother's emotional trauma after losing her kid. In fact, I felt more connected to the doctor who served in WWII and is suffering from severe mental health problems as a result of those awful experiences from his WW-2 service.
All of the actors have performed admirably in their roles. Unfortunately, they didn't have much to show for their acting abilities. Kenneth Branagh's Poirot' as usual, has managed to tread the fine line between being serious about his work and being a little playful in order to avoid turning this film into a gloomy mystery feature that reveals some dark secrets. Kyle Ellen, who played the dead girl's ex-fiance, was the most remarkable of the rest of the cast members.
Director Kenneth Branagh should understand that relying entirely on the excellence of other technical areas such as cinematography and production design is definitely not a good thing especially when you are making a film on such a popular figure.
All in all, if you want to watch another mystery drama to pass the time, you can watch 'A Haunting In Venice,' but if you want to watch something new and unique in this mystery genre that also has some emotional depth, 'A Haunting In Venice' is not the right choice.
Cast: Kyle Allen, Kenneth Branagh, Camille Cottin, Jamie Dornan, Tina Fey, Jude Hill, Ali Khan, Emma Laird, Kelly Reilly
Writer: Michael Green
Director: Kenneth Branagh
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