Kenneth Branagh | The Media Tourist

The latest Agatha Christie murder mystery is more tricks than treat

*Kenneth Branagh returns as detective Hercule Peroit.*

A Haunting in Venice
Starring Kenneth Branagh, Michelle Yeoh & Kelly Riley
Directed by Kenneth Branagh
PG-13

In theaters Friday, Sept. 15, 2023

Here’s an early Halloween trick-or-treat for fans of the late, great queen of murder mysteries, Agatha Christie.

A Haunting in Venice brings famed detective Hercule Peroit out of retirement in Italy, pried from piddling in his rooftop garden and nibbling on breakfast cannoli. He’s been coerced—by his visiting American author acquaintance (Tina Fey)—to a local Halloween bash followed by a séance, where things take a decidedly deathly turn. Based on Christie’s 1969 novel Hallowe’en Party, it puts an otherworldly twist on the typical murder-mystery whodunnit and transplants the tale from the novel’s setting of England to the Mediterranean’s iconic “City of Water.”

*Tina Fey plays an American mystery writer who bases her books on Peroit’s cases.*

Peroit (Kenneth Branagh) is skeptical about anything supernatural—like the supposed spiritualism of the medium (Michelle Yeoh) who arrives for the séance at the creepy old Venetian palazzo, the site of a former orphanage. She’s there to contact the spirit of a young girl who died on the premises, plunging out of a window and into the canal below. Was it suicide, was she insane, or was she murdered?

Peroit says he doesn’t believe in “God or ghosts,” but an unnerving night in this mysterious mansion may change his mind, especially when more bodies begin to drop—literally.

Venice marks Branagh’s third turn as Christie’s famous Belgian sleuth, following Murder on the Orient Express (2017) and Death on the Nile (2022). He’s joined by an international ensemble cast that includes London native Kelly Riley (she’s Beth Sutton on Yellowstone), Ireland’s Jude Hill (the young actor who starred in Branagh’s Oscar-nominated coming-of-age tale Belfast) and French actress Camille Cottin (who played Hélèn on Killing Eve).

*Kelly Reilly also stars on TV’s ‘Yellowstone.’*

As an esteemed Shakespearean-molded actor himself, and an accomplished director, Branagh certainly knows his way around both sides of the camera. He’s appeared in more than 40 films and directed nearly two dozen, including his two previous Agatha Christie outings, Disney’s live-action Cinderella, a Thor and even a Frankenstein.

The real mystery of A Haunting in Venice is why such an experienced, Oscar-winning, actor-director feels the need to trot out just about every trick in the filmmaking 101 playbook—odd camera angles, fisheye-lens views, 360-degree circular shots; jerky, jarring edits; abrupt jump-scare “gotcha” jolts every few minutes. There are a lot of ways to tell a scary story, and Branagh was apparently determined to use them all. The movie seems more interested in spooking the audience than in making its characters act and behave like they’re spending a long night with the realization they might be the next victim.

Set in 1947 and partially filmed in Venice, the movie is, however, rich in mood and atmosphere and does stir up some serious issues about the lingering traumas of war. Peroit and a young doctor (Jamie Dornan, the Irish actor who also starred in Belfast) grapple with unseen scars from the WWII battlefield. A young French sister and brother (Emma Laird, making her film debut after a role in the Paramount+ series Mayor of Eastown, and Ali Kahn), uprooted by the war, dream of a better life in faraway peacetime America. They’re all haunted by “ghosts” of a different kind, scarred by the things they’ve seen and done.

Everyone’s a suspect, of course. So…whodunnit? You’ll have to wait for the end when “the world’s greatest detective” reveals how he solved the case, and then it’s arrivederci. But by that time, you’ll likely have figured out on your own that this overstuffed, gimmicky mystery movie is more trick than treat.

—Neil Pond

Of Rags and Riches

New ‘Cinderella’ updates age-old fairytale with modern spectacle

Cinderella

Lily James, Cate Blanchett & Richard Madden

Directed by Kenneth Branagh

Downton Abbey launched the acting career of Lily James as the rebellious young Lady Rose, a character who joined the show’s sizeable ensemble in 2012. Now, in her first major movie role, the 25-year-old actress steps outside the Downton manor and into the iconic glass slippers of the most famous rags-to-riches fairy tale of all time.

Actor-turned-director Kenneth Branagh’s lavish, live-action production of Cinderella hews closely to the once-upon-a-time basics of the centuries-old European folk tale, especially the version with which most modern-day viewers are most familiar, Walt Disney’s iconic theatrical cartoon of 1950. But Branagh fills the outlines of Disney’s animated characters with pounding human heartbeats, encourages robust performances from his fine, mostly all-British cast, and wraps it all up in a sumptuous package of colorful, to-die-for costumes, spectacular settings and lush cinematography.

This Cinderella is also built on a deep foundation of tenderness and forgiveness, an antidote to all the cruelty and unfairness that our Cinderella will ultimately face, and overcome. “You have more kindness in your little finger than most people possess in their whole body,” says her dying mother (Hayley Atwell) to the little girl, “Ella” (Eloise Webb), who will grow up to become the “ragged servant girl” eventually transformed—for one literally magical night—into the princess of all princesses.

Cate Blanchett (center), Holliday Grainger and Sophie McShera

Lily James is as lovely as sunshine as the grown-up Cinderella, whose limitless optimism and kind-heartedness endures even after the arrival of her “evil” new stepmother (Kate Blanchett) and her two mean, dingbat daughters (Sophie McShera, also from Downton Abbey, and Holiday Granger).

You know the rest. But one of the coolest things about Branagh’s movie is how he makes this familiar tale feel so fresh, even though you know exactly where it’s going. He stages it like a full-scale period drama rather than a bedtime story, and there’s an epic splendor to everything—sweeping vistas of coastlines and oceans of the British Isles; vast, ornate castle interiors teeming with extras and activity; the lonely spaces of Cinderella’s attic quarters and kitchen.

Richard Madden

The ballroom sequence between Cinderella and the prince (Richard Madden from Game of Thrones) is magnificent; the transformation of the pumpkin into a glistening, golden carriage—courtesy of the fairy godmother (Helena Bonham Carter)—is a thing of whimsical wonder; the climactic, kingdom-wide search for the foot that perfectly fits the left-behind slipper has intrigue, humor, edge and suspense.

Both James and Madden find characters beyond—and beneath—their starry-eyed storybook romance, and Blanchett maintains a delicious, delicate balance of coldness and camp.

This grand new version of Cinderella may not make you believe in fairytales. But it might make you think, like Cinderella, that with enough “love, kindness and occasionally, a little bit of magic,” the world might, indeed, become a better place.

—Neil Pond, Parade Magazine

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Of Rags and Riches

New ‘Cinderella’ updates age-old fairytale with modern spectacle