A Haunting in Venice

As a fan of Kenneth Branagh's previous Agatha Christie adaptations, I was really excited to see A Haunting in Venice last night.  I thoroughly enjoyed it and think it is the best of the trilogy.  Crime novelist Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey) compels Hercule Poirot (Branagh), now living in Venice with a former police officer named Vitale Portfoglio (Riccardo Scamarcio) as a bodyguard, to come out of retirement to attend a seance and help her expose a medium as a fraud.  The seance takes place on Halloween at a palazzo, purported to be haunted by the spirits of orphans who died there, owned by the opera singer Rowena Drake (Kelly Reilly).  She has enlisted the medium Joyce Reynolds (Michelle Yeoh) to contact the spirit of her daughter Alicia who committed suicide after her fiance Maxime Gerard (Kyle Allen) broke their engagement.  During the seance, Reynolds seems to be possessed by Alicia's spirit and announces that she did not die by suicide but was murdered by one of the guests.  When Reynolds is later found dead, Poirot surmises that she was killed by the same person who killed Alicia and enlists Oliver's help to interrogate the guests: Rowena's housekeeper Olga Seminoff (Camille Cottin), Alicia's doctor Leslie Ferrier (Jamie Dornan) and his precocious son Leopold (Jude Hill), Reynolds' assistants Desdemona and Nicholas Holland (Emma Laird and Ali Khan, respectively), and Gerard.  This is very loosely adapted from Christie's novel Hallowe'en Party and, once I stopped worrying about the differences between it and the source material, I began to appreciate it as a moody and atmospheric exploration of grief with some powerful performances from Branagh and his all-star cast.  I loved the addition of the supernatural to the usual murder mystery and there are some truly scary sequences.  The images on the screen are stunning and the cinematography makes use of fish-eye lenses, Dutch angles, extreme close-ups, and overhead shots to emphasize the disorientation felt by the characters.  The dramatic low-level lighting and the score by Hildur Gudnadottir (who is becoming one of my favorite movie composers) featuring a plaintive melody by a solo clarinet adds to the unease.  I really liked Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile but I loved this and I highly recommend it!

Note:  I really hope Branagh keeps making these adaptations!