A Night of Frights, a Missed Opportunity: “A Haunting in Venice”
One of the most captivating aspects of “A Haunting in Venice” is its ending. Irrespective of the plot, the dawn-lit Venice in the closing shots is breathtaking. The sunrise over the palazzo exudes a magnificent beauty that exists independently of the novel and the film. Venice, as a city, possesses an allure and enchantment that transcends time. Love and death in Venice feel timeless and ageless. Director Kenneth Branagh keenly recognized this, yet he squandered Venice’s unique role as a character in its own right. In fact, he also wasted Agatha Christie’s original concept and a cast of dedicated actors. Adapted from the novel “Hallowe’en Party,” “A Haunting in Venice” becomes a pretentious Halloween farce, excessively flamboyant and over-the-top.
The “Alienated” Poirot’s Investigation
“Hallowe’en Party” is often considered one of Agatha Christie’s “lesser” works. This isn’t necessarily due to a decline in Christie’s writing quality. Rather, the story subverts readers’ expectations and conventional thinking. It’s as if detective Poirot has wandered onto the set of a Miss Marple story. The plot unfolds in a newly developed village near London, a semi-enclosed community of acquaintances with a degree of transience. Typically, in Christie’s novels, this “small-town mystery” setting is where Miss Marple shines.
“Hallowe’en Party” offers a sense of “alienation” for readers familiar with Poirot’s stories. It also presents an “alienated” investigative experience for Poirot himself. The murder occurs before Poirot even arrives. A girl, known for her tall tales, dies mysteriously at a Hallowe’en party. Invited by his friend, the mystery novelist Ariadne Oliver, Poirot travels from London to the village. This unassuming, amiable little man quietly infiltrates the close-knit community, piecing together the shocking truth from seemingly unrelated details.
The story contains many familiar Christie elements. For example, the chain of tragedies begins with schemes involving money or inheritance, with a succession of deceived and murdered young women. However, “Hallowe’en Party” isn’t just another formulaic, best-selling novel where Christie repeats her usual tropes. Within the familiar framework, she offers observations on the changing British society after the war: urbanization leading to population shifts, generational gaps between the old and young caused by popular culture, and the older generation’s distrust of the increasingly encroaching outside world. People and events with uncertain elements evoke fear, and a vague sense of “mental instability” permeates society. Christie doesn’t explicitly emphasize social issues in her narrative. Her writing style is restrained and light, giving the illusion that she’s merely writing about small-town anecdotes.
Low-Key Novel vs. High-Octane Film
In the original novel, no shocking events occur overtly. Even when Poirot identifies the murderer and realizes he’s about to target a new victim, it remains a peaceful scene of garden conversation. The murderer is silent, and Poirot is even more so. Christie’s writing style is characterized by a subtle approach, where characters’ actions and feelings are delicate and barely perceptible. The only time Poirot expresses his “feelings” in this story is when he complains about the pain in his feet from walking too much on country lanes in his formal leather shoes – a discomfort that is both invisible and not to be shared with others.
Branagh is clearly unsatisfied with the “lightness” of Christie’s original work. He wants to emphasize the legendary aspects and heighten the dramatic tension. Thus, he replaces the nameless small town near London with the opulent Venice. To be precise, Branagh’s adaptations of Agatha Christie – “Murder on the Orient Express,” “Death on the Nile,” and “A Haunting in Venice” – are anything but “silent.” They are, in fact, “too loud.”
While Branagh hadn’t fully established his “personal style” in “Murder on the Orient Express,” it becomes evident in “Death on the Nile.” The landscapes along the Nile are amplified, and the passions between the lovers are exaggerated. Branagh creates a heightened sense of scale in his films, both emotionally and sensorially. He uses direct impact to eliminate the writer’s subtlety. “A Haunting in Venice” explicitly transforms the undercurrents of “verbal sparring” into a jump-scare horror film. After being drugged with a hallucinogenic substance, Poirot takes the audience on a “midnight haunted house” tour through an old Venetian mansion. A night of rain causes the canals of Venice to surge, and a gondola in the storm crashes into the ornate palazzo, making it teeter precariously – a scene that feels completely out of place.
The drastic makeover in “Death on the Nile” completely alters the characters’ backgrounds and personalities, forcing the audience to play a “character matching” game between the film and the novel. “A Haunting in Venice” takes an even bigger leap. Branagh borrows some plot elements and character names from the novel, rearranges them, and creates a story that bears no resemblance to the original. This is roughly equivalent to rewriting “Dream of the Red Chamber” as “Dominating CEO Jia Baoyu Falls in Love with Downtrodden Girl Lin Daiyu.”
Agatha Betrayed
With three consecutive “Agatha Reimagined” films, Branagh, as director, has created a distinct personal style, but at the cost of treating Agatha Christie’s novels as cash cows. Or, the original works are reduced to dolls, painted and dressed haphazardly. The obvious differences in artistic temperament involve not only divergent aesthetic tastes but, more profoundly, differences in the author’s stance.
Agatha Christie’s novels are permeated with a female-centric empathy. “Hallowe’en Party” has an underlying tone of sorrow, about a girl who unknowingly loves her biological father in despair. The father, knowing the girl’s identity, still seduces her, uses her, and even decides to kill her to silence her. He quietly paints her portrait, signing the painting “Iphigenia” – a reference to the daughter in Greek legend who was tragically killed by her father. Agamemnon sacrificed her to the gods in exchange for victory on the battlefield. Branagh’s most complete betrayal of Agatha Christie lies in changing the unscrupulous father into a mother with a terrifying need for control, who methodically turns her adult daughter into a “little girl who never grows up” and keeps her tied down, ultimately causing her accidental death in a tragic way.
Agatha Christie writes about wives who die violently and daughters who are deceived. She repeatedly writes about men who meticulously plot to drive women to despair in unseen ways. Poirot or Miss Marple do everything in their power to help women escape from these desperate situations. Branagh’s “new stories” completely subvert this. Poirot is a man trapped by aging and inner demons, surrounded by various suffering men and wronged men, while the women are either cunning female writers, fraudulent female con artists, or terrible old mothers. They are either dead or unworthy of redemption. This is probably enough to make Agatha Christie turn over in her grave.