“A Haunting in Venice” Has the Charm of Ridiculous Excess

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. 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. 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). 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.

Branagh returns as Hercule Poirot, who has retired to a Venetian fastness. 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. A local heavy named Portfoglio (Riccardo Scamarcio), who sounds like a stockbroker but is actually an ex-cop, functions as a gatekeeper. The one outsider to whom he allows entry is Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey), a crime novelist on the make. She urges the sleuth to accompany her to a séance, where a celebrated medium, Mrs. Reynolds (Michelle Yeoh), will make contact with the beyond. Ariadne’s plan is that Poirot, as an arch-rationalist, will debunk the claims of the paranormal. And Branagh’s plan, as a guileful filmmaker, is to rebunk them to the hilt.

Prepare yourself, therefore, for all the tricks. 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. A parrot called Harry, who has kept his beak shut for the same reason. A housekeeper (Camille Cottin) given to speaking in Latin, who alone has access to the daughter’s room. A British doctor (Jamie Dornan), traumatized by his wartime experience. 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 concealed basement, complete with skeletons. A knitted rabbit. Missing bees. A typewriter whose keys depress themselves. 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.

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. (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). 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. Leopold cares for his quaking father, reads Edgar Allan Poe, and, asked about his sympathy with the dead, replies, “Some of them are my friends.” He and the boy in “The Sixth Sense” (1999) would have plenty to talk about.

For the constitutionally morbid, such as Leopold, nowhere can outgloom Venice. “The most beautiful of tombs,” Henry James called it, and I am always bemused by its reputation as a romantic refuge. How can you honeymoon in a city defined by dissolution and decay? Think of Joseph Losey, who took a Hollywood potboiler, James Hadley Chase’s “Eve,” and, like Branagh, moved the plot to Venice. The result was “Eva” (1962), a memorial to disenchantment, in which Jeanne Moreau, as a heedless hedonist, left her lover with his dignity drenched and his heart in ruins. Part of the film unfolded on Torcello, in winter, far from the dazzle of the Grand Canal.

If every Venetian tale has been told, then, and every view exhaustively documented in print or paint, what can “A Haunting in Venice” hope to add to the mix? It’s only a couple of months since Hayley Atwell and Rebecca Ferguson were busy battling a villain on one of the city’s bridges in the latest “Mission: Impossible,” and, for the Venetian mourning of drowned daughters, there is nothing to rival “Don’t Look Now” (1973). Yet Branagh’s film has the charm of ridiculous excess: stylistic flourishes are piled high into a treasury of gothic camp, and the camera is tilted, regardless of provocation, at the most alarming angles—Dutch angles, as they are known in the trade. If you really want to feel at home, M. Poirot, forget Venice. Onward to Amsterdam!

According to the historical record, Augusto Pinochet, who came to power in Chile after a military coup fifty years ago, was born in 1915 and died in 2006. According to “El Conde,” on the other hand, a new movie from the Chilean director Pablo Larraín, Pinochet was around for centuries. He began as Claude Pinoche, a young French officer in the army of Louis XVI, who observed the excesses of the French Revolution at close quarters—so close that, after the execution of Marie Antoinette, he snuck up to the guillotine and licked her blood from the blade. This was no regular brute, you see. He was a vampire.

Such is the conceit that drives this unusual film. Tracking the course of Pinochet’s misdeeds, it jumps forward to the modern age, passes swiftly over the span of his dictatorial reign, and alights on his casket as he lies in state. A small window shows the peaceful visage of the deceased, who opens his eyes and steals a glance, clearly impatient to rise again and resume his thirsty trade. Simple blood, we learn, does not satisfy Pinochet’s discerning palate; instead, he plucks out his victims’ hearts, pops them in a blender, and quaffs the liquidized gloop. Aside from a last-minute coda, “El Conde”—“The Count”—is entirely in black-and-white. The gore is as dark as tar.

The bulk of the story is set on a remote Chilean ranch. The sole occupants are Pinochet (Jaime Vadell), his wife, Lucía Hiriart (Gloria Münchmeyer), and their servant, Fyodor (Alfredo Castro), who takes great pride in the chronicle of his sadism, as meted out during the rule of the junta. To this desolate spot come Pinochet’s five children, who profess a feeble strain of love for their father but are mainly after his money. An accountant by the name of Carmencita (Paula Luchsinger) arrives, to sort out the family finances, not least the funds that were stashed away like a squirrel’s nuts. Carmencita, however, has a secret plan; she is a nun, in civilian disguise, and her suitcase is filled with the tools of an exorcist. The stakes are high.

Vampires notwithstanding, no one in the movie makes a more striking impact than Luchsinger. Close-cropped, sharp-featured, round-eyed, and beaming, she radiates a militant innocence. Yet her character’s purpose becomes perilously blurred, and there is something slack and unfocussed at the core of the plot. The more that Larraín tries to grab your attention with moral grotesquerie, as the Pinochets bicker over the legacy of the undead, the less inclined you are to yield. My suspicion is that “El Conde” is a one-trick tale. The image of a tyrant as an actual bloodsucker, rather than as a harsh subduer of his compatriots, would be meat and drink—especially drink—to a political cartoonist, but it has no narrative force to match its satirical bite. Few jokes, no matter how sick and strong, can be told over and over without beginning to fade.

The film is narrated in the unmistakable tones of Margaret Thatcher (Stella Gonet), who deigns to make a guest appearance in the later stages. It is true that, after Pinochet was indicted for human-rights violations in 1998, and held under house arrest in Britain, Thatcher (and George H. W. Bush) argued that he should be released. Anyone watching “El Conde,” though, and knowing little of that period, will be left with the impression that she was not so much Pinochet’s ally as his monstrous mate—even, perhaps, his superior—with savage tastes of her own. Like him, she flies serenely through vast gray skies, her cape spread out in a bat’s wing. Being a lady, she sips blood from a china cup, as if it were Earl Grey tea.

The fact that Thatcher, unlike Pinochet, was fairly elected, and that she governed a country in which you could call the Prime Minister a vampire without getting thrown out of a helicopter or beaten to a pulp, may be too fine and too dull a distinction to trouble Larraín. His is a curious case: his work has grown sillier, not wiser, in his maturity. The baroque paranoia of “Jackie” (2016), “Spencer” (2021), and “El Conde,” bulging with nightmares of conspiracy, is less persuasive than the urgency of “NO” (2012). That was Larraín’s best film, firmly grounded in the campaign to defeat Pinochet in a referendum of 1988, and peopled with ordinary Chileans who had endured more than enough and gathered themselves to hit back. Where are such folk in “El Conde”? Who needs a movie that is almost all predators, with barely a word from their prey? ♦