Thunderstorms during the morning hours, then skies turning partly cloudy during the afternoon. High around 85F. Winds SSE at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 70%..
Tonight
A few clouds. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 68F. Winds SSE at 10 to 15 mph.
Richard Branaugh, the now veteran actor and director, has been making feature film versions of Agatha Christie’s detective story novels for six years, I believe. Having knocked off “Murder on the Orient Express” and “Death on the Nile,” he now turns to a less well-known book, “Halloween Party.”
Not that Michael Green’s screenplay much resembles the 1969 novel. The new film is re-set in 1947 Venice, where Poirot, Christie’s little Belgian policeman, has gone into retirement, protected from his public by a recently-retired Italian policeman. The horrors of the Second World War have caused him to lose faith.
Novelist Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey), who has capitalized on her friendship with Poirot (Branaugh), convinces him to come along to a seance run by a medium (Michelle Yeoh) so skilled that proving her to be a fake will require the great detective’s talents.
The spiritualist will be pretending to try to speak to a dead young woman whose mother, retired opera star Rowena Drake (Kelly Reilly), is hosting a Halloween party for school children. Her house is a natural for the party, a crumbling canal-side mansion where children were reportedly locked in and left to die during a plague epidemic.
Also present at the seance are the dead girl’s fiancee, Rowena’s nurse, a doctor suffering an emotional crisis caused by his experiences at a German concentration camp, the doctor’s bright ten-year-old son, and a brother and sister who are earning money working secretly for the seer so that they can travel to their ideal place, St. Louis Misery.
Poirot quickly identifies the paid helpers. But then he begins to see things that aren’t there, to hear the dead girl sing and to see her hiding behind a curtain and so on. He for some reason puts on the fake medium’s cloak and mask and goes to bob for apples. Have we suspended disbelief? Someone comes up behind and forces his face underwater.
From then on the events pop along. The movie is talky, but there are regular moments, brief ones, of action or of dramatic images, as when the basement of the old, creaky house begins to flood. Two of those assembled for the after party die violent deaths and the foggy-headed detective with the big mustache locks everyone left alive in the house while he investigates.
And from there the story is largely coincidental. Then its characters recover too fast from tragedy and perfidy. But will our hero recover his faith? And will we understand why he does if he does?
The movie looks good, but then it is up-dated noir, so one would expect it to have visual appeal. It doesn’t have original visual detail. It does have a number of briskly sketched characters and a plot which resolves itself in a decent surprise followed by another, lesser one that may not work so well because we expect one of the characters involved to be much more shaken by events.
The Branaugh Christies have so far all been like this. Last spring, with London theater only just waking up a little from the pandemic lock-down, I went to see Christie’s long, long running West End mystery play “The Mousetrap.” The fun with it was all in seeing how plays looked and went during the early 1950s. The story itself left this viewer nonplussed.
Which has also been my reaction to the Irish Olivier’s Poirot mystery movies. Yeah. OK. That’s fair, I guess. One is busy forgetting these entertainments as soon as one leaves the theater.
