{Movie Review} Sympathy with the Dead: Pregaming Halloween with A Haunting in Venice (2023)

“Scary stories make life less scary.”

A lot of people I know absolutely hate the Kenneth Branagh Hercule Poirot films. And while I had fun with both Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile, I’m not going to say that those people are wrong. Both of those films have a plethora of problems, on top of their relative fidelity (or lack thereof) to the source material, a subject to which I cannot speak.

Will those same people also hate A Haunting in Venice? Probably, though it’s too early to say. I sort of loved it, though, which wasn’t true of either of the previous Branagh Poirots, for all that I enjoyed my time with them. The reason for my increased affection is likely obvious right from the title, or from the fact that the murder that kicks off our story this time around takes place during a séance at a Halloween party.

Leaving my predilections for the holiday and for ghoulish entertainments aside for the moment, though, if we can, it really does feel like Branagh has finally found the metier that matches his material with A Haunting in Venice – ironic, perhaps, given that this is by far the loosest of the three adaptations. Where the previous two Poirot films were sometimes tripped up by their star-studded ensembles, their CGI matte scenery, and their intentional camp, A Haunting in Venice is, for the most part, a sober affair locked into a single location filled with echoing chambers cast in the heavy shadows of World War II.

And it works. While the actual horror imagery of ghosts and skeletons may occasionally lapse into what has become the bog-standard CGI of screaming specters lunging at the camera, there is precious little of that here and, instead, the lion’s share of the atmospheric heavy lifting is handled by the film’s cyclopean setting – a haunted palazzo in Venice during a torrential downpour on Halloween night.

Though most of the levity of the previous two films has been abandoned, there is plenty of fun to be had. Throughout the picture, various characters admonish Poirot for not truly living, as Poirot and others are pressed to engage in the “frivolous” games that the orphans are playing at the Halloween party which precedes the film’s murders. Bobbing for apples, knocking over pegs, watching a skeleton dance in a zoetrope. These are games played in the shadow of death and, more than anything, that’s what A Haunting in Venice feels like.

The working out of the various characters and their motives may be a study in reckoning with guilt, layered deeper and deeper, from the “children’s vendetta” that supposedly curses the palazzo to the horrors of survival in wartime to the murders that mar the evening and set the game in motion, but for those of us watching, it’s all an act of whistling past the graveyard.

“Scary stories make life less scary,” author Ariadne Oliver, played by Tina Fey, says to Poirot, when asked if the haunted history of the palazzo (depicted via shadow puppets) might be too much for the assembled orphans. It’s as good a motto for the movie as any.

The mystery itself has a dutifully naturalistic conclusion and, truth be told, not an especially exciting one. But the mystery is merely the invitation, the thing that gets us into the party. The real fun and games is neither mystery nor haunting but merely atmosphere, and A Haunting in Venice fairly drips with it, making expert use of its spooky interiors and the incessant rain outside. It’s not going to reinvent any wheels, but for fans of this sort of thing, it’s the perfect way to spend a gloomy evening – or, in my case, a sunny afternoon.

While the aesthetics of the picture have more in common with ‘70s gothics than the movies of the era in which it is set, there’s no denying that, in other ways, A Haunting in Venice is entirely of a piece with many of the horror films of the ‘40s – films where the specter of the war still hung heavy, even if the movies weren’t strictly about it.

The tragedies of A Haunting in Venice, after all, have precious little to do with the events of World War II, and yet its ghosts are the ones that haunt the ensemble more than any spooks which may inhabit the decaying palazzo. Which is as it should be, for a movie set in 1947, and partaking of a direct line from old dark house pictures and spook stories from the ‘40s.

Ultimately, A Haunting in Venice isn’t much of a horror picture. Its sporadic scares are too rote, its mystery too tidy. But none of that did much to detract from its pleasures, at least for me. It is, instead, the ideal piece of pregaming for the Halloween season – a cozy bit of shivery dread wrapped up in a perfectly comfortable package. A person of my predilections could hardly ask for more.