Venice jaunt is great but this is least interesting of Branagh’s Poirots

A Haunting in Venice is based on Christie’s 1969 novel Halloween Party, which unfolds in an English country house. Branagh, the director and star, and screenwriter Michael Green, have shifted the location with the approval of the Christie estate.

Kenneth Branagh's latest turn as Hercule Poiroit in A Haunting in Venice

Venice is a place of light and dark, of magic, mystery and malevolence. I’ve long been interested in the writers and filmmakers who like to skip the gondola rides and explore the darker corners of the famous Italian city.

Nicolas Roeg’s 1973 thriller Don’t Look Now, based on Daphne du Maurier’s short story, is close to the scariest film I have seen. Paul Schrader’s The Comfort of Strangers (1990), adapted from Ian McEwan’s novel, is a twisted sexual-psychological drama. Both are set in Venice.

As is often the case, though, reality exceeds the imagination. No one has made a film about Venice’s Butcher of Santa Croce, who in the early 1500s added bits of murdered children to his sausages and stews.

It’s no surprise then that Kenneth Branagh has chosen Venice for his third outing as Agatha Christie’s Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, following Murder on the Orient Express (2017) and Death on the Nile (2022).

A Haunting in Venice is based on Christie’s 1969 novel Halloween Party, which unfolds in an English country house. Branagh, the director and star, and screenwriter Michael Green, who wrote the two previous films, have shifted the location with the approval of the Christie estate.

It’s 1947 and Poirot, soon after cracking the Nile case, has retired to Venice. His fame means he is mobbed in the streets by people who think they have mysteries to solve. He deals with this by employing an ex-cop as his bodyguard.

These films have ensemble casts and the two actors worth watching this time around are Tina Fey and Michelle Yeoh, fresh from her Oscar for Everything Everywhere All at Once.

Fey is Ariadne Oliver, an American author of murder mystery novels. Her main character is a Finnish detective who bears similarities to Poirot. She and Poirot are friends. “I’m the smartest person I ever met and I can’t figure it out so I came to the second smartest,’’ she tells him after dropping in unannounced.

What she can’t figure out is whether a famous psychic, Joyce Reynolds (Yeoh), is a fake. She and Poirot head to a palazzo where Reynolds has been asked to speak to the dead daughter of the owner, a former opera star (Kelly Reilly).

The scenes between Yeoh and Branagh are the best in the film, as is the dialogue between Fey and Branagh. Poirot warns what will happen if he comes out of retirement: “You wake the bear from his sleep, you cannot cry when he tangos.’’ She replies: “That’s not a saying in any language.”

Poirot’s bear awakens on a dark and stormy night that also happens to be Halloween. The palazzo is a former orphanage and the legend is that it is haunted by the vengeful ghosts of the children who died there.

Also present are the family doctor (Jamie Dornan), who was at the liberation of Bergen-Belsen and is suffering PTSD, his precocious pre-teen son (Jude Hill, who was Dornan’s son in Branagh’s superb 2021 film Belfast), the devout housekeeper (Camille Cottin), the dead daughter’s former fiance (Kyle Allen), Poirot’s bodyguard (Riccardo Scamarcio) and the psychic’s helpers (Emma Laird and Ali Khan).

The seance takes place and, and as must be the case, one of the people present is murdered in theatrical circumstances. Poirot locks the doors and orders that no one can leave until he has worked out whodunit. The question is, was the murdering hand human, as Poirot believes, or supernatural.

“For once in your life admit you are up against something bigger than you,’’ the novelist tells him. Poirot in turns tells his old friend that “every murderer is somebody’s old friend”.

While Branagh, Fey and Yeoh are enjoyable to watch, this is the least impressive of Branagh’s Poirot films, especially when it comes to the inevitable denouement. Having Poirot simply explain who did what and why, as though reading from a novel, falls short when it comes to cinematic imagination. The locked-in-a-palazzo setting also means Venice itself is not much of the story. It could be happening in an English country house. There isn’t the drama inherent in being on the Nile or aboard the Orient Express.

That doesn’t mean Poirot must be put out to pasture. Christie wrote 33 Poirot novels, so there may be life in the fastidious old moustache yet.

Milan state police sergeant Franco Amore (Pierfrancesco Favino) is the antithesis of Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry. He’s an honest cop, a “man of integrity”, who in 35 years on the job has not fired his gun at anyone.

“My dad is Amore by name and by nature,’’ says his grown daughter Anna (Noemi Bertoldi). Both name and nature are put to the test in the Italian language crime thriller The Last Night of Amore (L’Ultima Notte di Amore).

Amore’s amore is his second wife, Viviana (Linda Caridi), who is from a mafia family. He suspects that link is why he is still a sergeant at 55. He follows the rules and has his pension in sight, though he does earn a little on the side working as driver for Viviana’s flashy jewel dealer cousin Cosimo (Antonio Gerardi).

Cosimo is expanding his business with the help of Chinese gangsters. When the head of one of the gangs, Bao Zhang (Mao Wen), has a heart attack in less than salubrious circumstances, Amore, on the spot, saves the man’s life and changes his own.

Zhang offers him a job in security. Amore, who is about to retire, agrees but then learns that the first shipment he must secure – diamonds? drugs? – is this week, while he’s still on the force.

The amount offered for one hour’s work is €5000, equal to three months salary. With Viviana and Cosimo keen for him to take it, he assents and cuts in his squad mate and best friend Dino (Francesco Di Leva).

Franco and Dino meet two Chinese couriers, who hold a briefcase containing the shipment, to drive them to Zhang. In a freeway tunnel they are pulled over by two uniformed police officers. What happens next changes everything. It is a brilliant scene of sustained tension.

This is the mid-point of this two-hour film written and directed by Italian actor turned director Andrea Di Stefano. You may remember him as the priest in Ang Lee’s Life of Pi (2012).

The second hour, the immediate aftermath of what happens in the tunnel, takes place over the one night of the title. It is Amore’s final night on duty. Whether it will also be his last night on earth is the question.

Favino, who has made his share of Hollywood films, including World War Z (2013) with Brad Pitt, is convincing as a straight cop who walks one crooked line. Does he turn himself in, go on the run or realise he has a bit of Dirty Harry in him after all? Cinematographer Guido Michelotti captures this tightrope walk, from the opening aerial shot of Milan, sweeping from its old world charm to its criminal underbelly, to the heart-racing last night.

The Last Night of Amore, a box office hit in Italy, is the opening night movie of the ST. Ali Italian Film Festival. I have seen another of the headline films, The Eight Mountains (Le Otto Montagne), written and directed by Belgian filmmakers Charlotte Vandermeersch and Felix van Groeningen (whose English language debut was the superb Beautiful Boy in 2018, starring Timothee Chalamet and Steve Carrell). It’s a thought-provoking, moving film that I would give three-and-a-half stars. Set in the Italian Alps, it might be an Italian Brokeback Mountain or it might be an exploration of deep platonic love between two boys who become men. Will they kiss?, was one of the questions in my mind as the story unfolded over 147 minutes. Whether they do or don’t is for viewers to find out.