Movie Review: "A Haunting in Venice" (2023)

Written over the course of fifty years, more than thirty novels featuring this modern Sherlock Holmes have been released. A brilliant blend of golden age crime, the first novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles was published in 1920, only for the final novel to be sealed in a vault - Curtain was published in 1975, shortly before Agatha Christie herself died. A Haunting in Venice is loosely based on the fun and yet violent novel of the series Halloween Party and features though a different kind of story, similar characters with similar motives. A film which has some originality to suit it to the screen and ends up being more cinematic than it would have if it kept to the source material does well at making this possibly the best out of the three movies in the series so far.

The movie opens in 1947, so not too far after the second world war - we can tell from this that the timeline of the three films so far makes perfect sense though there are some gaps. In Venice, Poirot lives in retirement and is visited by an old friend named Ariadne Oliver and, if you have read the Poirot books then this is quite a treat because she is a friend of the detective. She invites him to a Halloween seance in order to debunk a woman named Joyce Reynolds who makes her money from running these 'contacting the dead sessions' and is running one at one of the most infamously haunted places in Venice to contact the spirit of a young girl recently dead from a fall from a balcony - apparently caused by the supernatural.

When we get to the part about the dead children locked in the building things get a little bit disturbing but, as we know from these films, everything is not what it seems to be and the haunting, the seance, the love triangle, the suicide, the murders plus everything in between may be a front for something else. In the middle of it is a small child reading Edgar Allan Poe who claims he can contact the dead children and can hear them. This is a really interesting supernatural thriller where the jigsaw slowly comes together in various small details.

The main plot of the film is set during one night, Halloween in Venice. I think that was a really interesting part because you can really get all the costumes out, but then again you can also feel the atmosphere as the waves of the canals hit against the building. This along with the rain and the midnight eerieness give off a great sensory feast to the mind and the audience become far more immersed in the movie. The difference between Venice during the day and Venice during the night is massive and this makes the whole atmosphere even more thrilling. I love the way this is done with the nighttime being shown from both the inside and outside of the building through various rooftop gardens and gateways that Poirot locks to not let anyone out.

Each of the performances of this film probably makes this one the strongest of the three. There were many good actors who were doing a really good job which we don't see in the likes of Murder on the Orient Express which felt messy and Death on the Nile which felt underdone. A Haunting in Venice is clearly the strongest because of its strong performances, especially from Jamie Dornan who surprised me at his ability to play a man with very severe PTSD. However, my favourite performance has to be without a shadow of a doubt Michelle Yeoh as Joyce Reynolds, the medium who attempts to contact the dead. She really made the movie feel chilling and with such great personality, she brought a showiness to the role which many audience members would associate with the world of fortune telling.

In conclusion, I believe again that this is the strongest of the series and would welcome more Poirot movies made like this. With strong performances, good writing and a brilliant atmosphere of thrilling chills, you can probably see why this one has scored full marks from me. I would quite happily watch this again and I hope I do.