![]() Here, Hill is scrubbed clean of any cuteness instead, he presents us with a kind of precocious mini-Poirot, solemnly clad in a dark suit and tie. (Christie could be cruel, when she wished, in the matter of fun gone wrong.) As if by way of redemption, the most interesting figure in “A Haunting in Venice” is another kid-Leopold, the doctor’s son, played by Jude Hill, who was the rascally tyke at the heart of Branagh’s “ Belfast” (2021). I remember being scared by “Hallowe’en Party” when I read it as a child, because the first victim was a child: a girl of twelve or thirteen, whose head was forced down into a bucket of water while she was bobbing for apples. A lashing nocturnal storm so wild that, when death descends, the police cannot reach the scene, meaning that Poirot must lock everyone in and- mon Dieu-solve the crime before breakfast. A typewriter whose keys depress themselves. A concealed basement, complete with skeletons. A handsome and reliably vacant rotter (Kyle Allen), who was once betrothed to Alicia and jilted her, apparently for money, which seems fair enough to me. A British doctor (Jamie Dornan), traumatized by his wartime experience. A housekeeper (Camille Cottin) given to speaking in Latin, who alone has access to the daughter’s room. A parrot called Harry, who has kept his beak shut for the same reason. ![]() A palazzo, said to be stuffed with ghosts and currently occupied by an operatic soprano, Rowena Drake (Kelly Reilly), who hasn’t sung a note since her daughter, Alicia (Rowan Robinson), fell into a canal and drowned. Prepare yourself, therefore, for all the tricks. And Branagh’s plan, as a guileful filmmaker, is to rebunk them to the hilt. Ariadne’s plan is that Poirot, as an arch-rationalist, will debunk the claims of the paranormal. Reynolds (Michelle Yeoh), will make contact with the beyond. She urges the sleuth to accompany her to a séance, where a celebrated medium, Mrs. The one outsider to whom he allows entry is Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey), a crime novelist on the make. A local heavy named Portfoglio (Riccardo Scamarcio), who sounds like a stockbroker but is actually an ex-cop, functions as a gatekeeper. There, ignoring the pleas of the importunate, who bug him with their private mysteries, he tends his garden, inspecting his plants through a magnifying glass as if to expose any guilty aphids. ![]() ![]() I’m already looking forward to their next reworking of Christie: “The Body in the Library,” perhaps, relocated to the freezer aisle of a Walmart.īranagh returns as Hercule Poirot, who has retired to a Venetian fastness. Now, that’s an adaptation-a bolder metamorphosis than anything essayed by Branagh and Green in “ Murder on the Orient Express” (2017) or “ Death on the Nile” (2022). Thanks to the director Kenneth Branagh and his screenwriter, Michael Green, the book has become a new film, “A Haunting in Venice,” and the action has shifted to Italy in 1947. Published in 1969, Agatha Christie’s “ Hallowe’en Party” is largely set in the fictional town of Woodleigh Common, “an ordinary sort of place,” thirty or forty miles from London.
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