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Poirot stalks through the opulent halls remorselessly, an all-seeing, hard-eyed avatar of justice, pulling revelations from foe and friend alike. There are plot twists, locked-room puzzles and hidden motivations everywhere. Horror, and its intimations of human fear, weakness and empathy for the departed spirits, is soon shuttled aside by the cozy’s usual clockwork mechanisms. “You’re jumpy,” the precocious, Edgar-Allan-Poe-reading child Leopold Ferrier (Jude Hill) tells Poirot with a chilly matter-of-factness that echoes that of the great detective himself. He looks discombobulated when Yeoh’s Joyce starts chewing up the sumptuous scenery during her screaming possession scene. “Haunting,” though, makes the detective less of a machine by using, not romance, but horror.Īs inexplicable phenomena pile up - disembodied voices of children singing, water pipes that won’t work, a banging in the basement - Poirot’s usual icy calm chips away. “Death on the Nile” gave him a tragic backstory and even a romantic interest. Rob Youngson/20th Century Foxīranagh’s Poirot films have made some efforts to humanize the detective. Kenneth Branagh's 'Death on the Nile' (2022) is based on Agatha Christie's 1937 novel of the same name. Rowena lives in a house where many children are supposed to have perished in a plague, and the intimation is that those children took her daughter with them into the afterlife. Said daughter fell into the canal after a long illness caused, perhaps, by a broken heart. Reynolds has been hired by opera diva Rowena Drake (Kelly Reilly) to try to make contact with her daughter. But his old friend, the mystery novelist Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey) convinces him to help her try to debunk a medium, Joyce Reynolds (Michelle Yeoh), at a Halloween seance. At the beginning of the film, Poirot has retired in Venice.

“A Haunting in Venice” deliberately calls for the cozy/horror comparison, since, as the title suggests, it flirts with the supernatural. Cozies, though, with quiet efficiency, twirl their moustaches more cruelly than all those slashers, where death at least provokes a scream rather than a raised eyebrow. Horror is often the genre pilloried as a sadistic danger to the psyches of the public, along with true crime. But focusing on tidiness in the face of suffering requires a stifling of empathy, and an indifference to a lot of carnage.Ĭharacters gather around Joyce Reynolds (Michelle Yeoh) in 'A Haunting in Venice.' 20th Century Studios Branagh’s Poirot, who even measures his eggs at breakfast, sees his job as taking the mess and uncertainty of life and death and organizing it into neat, clean solutions. “A Haunting in Venice” shows once again, though, that turning murder into a parlor game is often less harmless fun and more blank bloodthirstiness. Even the surprises feel calibrated not to startle too much. Christie classics like “Murder on the Orient Express” set violence amidst opulence, with Poirot interviewing each colorful character and jotting down their characteristics in a trusty notebook.

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Series like “Murder, She Wrote” or “Death in Paradise” are reliably, reassuringly formulaic, with the death clocking in near the opening theme, and the solution slotted in right at the end.

Though in this one, Poirot (Branagh) seems even less concerned by the death toll as he brags about his ratiocination while the luxuriant cinematography caresses the Venetian canals.Ĭozies are usually thought of as a cute or comfortable genre - after all, you’ve got “cozy” right in the name. As in “ Death on the Nile” (2022), Branagh’s last Christie exercise, Poirot’s victory speech is given with him almost literally standing on top of a pile of corpses. You also won’t be surprised to learn that he does it only after a lot of people have died.

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