JP Nunez
I’m not going to lie, when I first heard about Kenneth Branagh’s latest Hercule Poirot movie A Haunting in Venice, I didn’t pay much attention to it. Agatha Christie murder mysteries aren’t usually my thing, and the first two films in this trilogy, Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile, were only decently received at best. Nothing about this movie appealed to me, so I just ignored it and went on my merry way. But then something changed. Disney dropped a trailer for A Haunting in Venice at CinemaCon, and after watching it on a bit of a whim, I have to say I’m actually really excited about this film now.
It’s based on the Agatha Christie novel Hallowe’en Party, and it follows the world’s greatest detective, Hercule Poirot, as he tries to live out a peaceful retirement in Venice. One day, he reluctantly agrees to attend a seance in a palazzo that’s supposedly haunted, and as luck would have it, one of the guests is murdered while he’s there.
So naturally, Poirot has to figure out who committed the crime, but this time, there seems to be a bit of a twist. The official plot synopsis says that the detective finds himself “thrust into a sinister world of shadows and secrets,” and the trailer for A Haunting in Venice suggests that there just might be something genuinely supernatural going on.
To be fair, I’m not sure I really buy the supernatural angle here. I suspect it’s just a ruse, and by the end of it, Hercule Poirot is going to pull a Scooby-Doo and discover that these ghostly goings-on have a perfectly natural explanation.
But either way, I still really want to see this movie. The trailer is chock-full of genuinely creepy imagery, and the murder mystery angle adds a bit of a unique touch that we don’t normally get in horror films. So whether these ghosts are real or not, I think A Haunting in Venice looks pretty damn good, and I’m putting it on my to-watch list right away.
A Haunting in Venice is set to hit theaters on September 15.
