Another mystery that doesn’t take a detective to solve, but this time with scares!

Score: 2.5/5

Welcome back to the third Kenneth Branagh-directed Agatha Christie novel film adaptation. Just like Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile, this whodunnit is okay. It’s not particularly that clever on the twists but is mostly serviceable for the genre. While the plot wasn’t that interesting, there were some new pieces to this puzzle, a dash of the horror genre and a noticeable shift in pacing. That may sound interesting, but it actually really soured the experience for me.

Before jumping to those details, the story. It’s another situation of detective Hercule Poirot getting pulled into a situation he doesn’t necessarily want to be a part of, and murders start popping up. This time it’s in Venice after World War II, right around Halloween, in a supposedly haunted palazzo. While Poirot works to solve the case, he starts to see things that can’t be explained, which, if you have watched any of the other movies, points to a pretty obvious answer as to why the logical man is seeing otherworldly things. This falls flat more than usual because from the get-go, the movie has Tina Fey’s fictional author Ariadne Oliver pushing for Poirot to accept that ghosts and spirits exist.

That guidance to such a collusion doesn’t work for Poirot, and it also didn’t work for me. From there, a lot of story does what these other whodunnits have done before, providing a backstory of sorts for everyone in the palazzo during the night of the murders. The end didn’t feel as telegraphed as last year’s Death on the Nile, where you could tell from the opening scene who committed the murders, but the reveal of who actually did it wasn’t that shocking. When it seems like no one has done it, versus having a very clear idea of who everyone thinks actually did it, it makes it hard to gasp at the reveal. The other thing that felt a bit lacking in this entry was a little more of an exploration of Poirot himself. Where Death of the Nile focused a good deal on his war background and the trauma from these experiences, this story just glossed over exploring the depth of the now-retired detective.

Like the previous two entries, the ensemble around Kenneth Branagh’s Poirot is interesting. This entry does not have as wide a variety of heavy hitters, but everyone does a good job in their roles. I really enjoyed Jude Hill’s performance of Leopold Ferrier, a brilliant young boy who is taking care of his mentally broken father, Dr. Leslie Ferrier, played by Jamie Dornan. I was also happy to see Riccardo Scamarcio as Vitale Portfoglio, Poirot’s Italian bodyguard. His restrained style of acting speaks to my noir sensibilities, and I want Hollywood to notice that more. The big-ticket names Tiny Fey and Michelle Yeoh play their parts, but both feel less like characters and more like actors playing them. They stick out so much that they would take me out of scenes.

Stepping outside the plot and characters, the thing that did inject some intrigue into this movie was sprinkling the mood of a horror movie. In the beginning, it played out like a haunted house where both Poirot and I could see the strings, but it slowly evolved into some true ghost story presentation. Unfortunately, it tries to toe the line between true horror and vanilla horror for the whole family and can’t seem to find the right balance. It all comes down to the fact that this isn’t really a horror ghost movie; it’s just wearing that like a mask. It feels restrained in the wrong ways, which was a bummer.

An unwanted effect of going this route also led to the other thing that was really noticeable to me for this particular Poirot mystery. This movie felt slow. The structure of the movie was indeed the same as the others, but to let some of the horror-lite aspects have room to breathe, scenes sat for far too long. This isn’t a long movie, either. It’s the shortest of the three films at one hour and forty-three minutes. It felt like the longest of the movies, though. That’s a problem.

In the end, this is another Agatha Christie story. It doesn’t stray too far from its formula, but the attempts to add a new flavor actually hamper the overall film for me. If you just want another casual murder mystery movie though, you’ll probably enjoy it more than I did.