103 min | PG-13 | September 15, 2023 | 20th Century Studios
Kenneth Branagh’s Poirot retires to a crumbling Venetian palazzo and gets dragged to a Halloween seance. A girl drowned in the canal years ago, and the dead are supposedly talking. The detective who believes in nothing finally meets something he cannot explain, or so the house wants him to think.
Hercule Poirot has quit. He lives in self-imposed exile in postwar Venice, refusing cases and guarding his door against the people who still want his mind. His old friend the mystery novelist Ariadne Oliver drags him to a Halloween seance inside a decaying palazzo that locals call cursed. A medium claims to channel a dead girl who drowned there, and a body soon follows. This is the franchise turning toward horror, and the real subject is faith. Poirot has spent his life trusting reason, and the film puts that trust under siege.
Kenneth Branagh plays Poirot as a man hollowed out by grief and certainty. The famous ego is gone, replaced by exhaustion and a flinch at every claim of the supernatural. Tina Fey plays Ariadne Oliver as a writer who has run dry and needs Poirot to be wrong about something. Michelle Yeoh plays the medium Joyce Reynolds with control and contempt, never overselling the act. Kelly Reilly plays the grieving mother Rowena Drake with a brittle composure that keeps cracking. Jamie Dornan plays the shell-shocked Dr. Leslie Ferrier as a man who flinches before the violence arrives.
Branagh directs from a script by Michael Green, who also wrote the previous two Poirot films. The camera tilts into Dutch angles and crawls along the ceiling, turning the palazzo into a trap that watches its guests. Haris Zambarloukos shoots by candle and lightning, draining color until faces float in black water. The sound design weaponizes dripping canals and groaning wood. The production design buries the rooms in cobwebs and cracked frescoes, and the house earns its reputation before anyone dies.
The Gothic machinery works better than the mystery underneath it. The solution arrives clean and a little flat, and the puzzle never threatens the audience the way the atmosphere does. Branagh has figured out how to make these films feel like something instead of like prestige homework. The horror trappings give the series a reason to exist beyond the mustache. This is the most confident of the three, and it knows exactly what kind of ghost story it is telling.