Quartile rating: 7/10 · 1 rating
Celebrated sleuth Hercule Poirot, now retired and living in self-imposed exile in Venice, reluctantly attends a Halloween séance at a decaying, haunted palazzo. When one of the guests is murdered, the detective is thrust into a sinister world of shadows and secrets.
A Haunting in Venice leans hard into gothic atmosphere, and Branagh's cinematography is genuinely exceptional — Dutch angles, oppressive shadows, and a decaying palazzo rendered with real visual dread that elevates the film above its peers in the franchise. The plot is serviceable as a whodunit but the supernatural framing device feels undercooked, and the mystery's resolution is too tidy and rushed to feel earned, pulling the Ending down. Acting is competent across the board with Branagh giving his most internalized Poirot, though the ensemble is underserved by the script. Novelty scores modestly — the haunted-house horror inflection on a Christie adaptation is a fresh angle, but the whodunit skeleton remains conventional.