Dark and Stormy Night

A Haunting in Venice (2023) is Kenneth Branagh's latest, and possibly last, Hercule Poirot mystery. I think it is the first one that gets it right. 

It is set, obviously, in Venice. Poirot (Branagh) is retired. He has a bodyguard to protect him from the people who want him to solve their cases. But he lets through an old friend, Tina Fey, the mystery author whose best sellers are loosely based on Poirot. She wants him to join her for a Halloween party and seance. The medium, she feels, is either authentic or good enough to fool even Poirot.

The party, thrown for the city's orphans, is held in a decrepit palazzo, owned by Kelly Reilly, a retired opera singer. Her daughter died several years ago by suicide, haunted by the ghosts of the children who died in the palazzo in an earlier plague. It is her she seeks to contact via the seance.

When the medium arrives, she is played by Michelle Yeoh. She feels the presence of much misery, and in the seance, contacts the beyond through a magic typewriter. Of course, Poirot quickly debunks this, but Yeoh tells him she can truly contact the dead, and he should lighten up. She gives him her mask and cloak, and he is promptly attacked. He survives, but doesn't have any time to figure it out, because Yeoh shortly falls from a great height and is impaled in a staute.

There is a good deal more going on - a man broken by the war and his precocious son. The housekeeper. Yeoh's Romani assistants. And so on. There are more murders. And even Poirot starts to see things he can't explain.

The first Poirot, Murder on the Orient Express, was campy, almost satirical. The next, Death on the Nile, seemed to me to be a bit meandering, centerless. This one seemed tight, unified around the gloomy atmosphere of an ancient palazzo in a storm. The presence of ghosts seemed palpable, and there were even a few apparitions - it may even be that the mystery is solved by the ghost herself. 

Of course, Poirot solves everything, and sees that justice is done. In the end, he is so refreshed by this that he un-retires. I wonder if Branagh will reitre him here or not.