A Haunting in Venice

The third entry in Kenneth Branagh's Poirot series moves the detective out of trains and onto the canals of postwar Venice, where a retired Poirot reluctantly attends a seance at a decaying palazzo. The film adapts Christie's Hallowe'en Party rather than one of her marquee mysteries, and the gothic shift is deliberate: Branagh stages the investigation as a haunted-house thriller, with shadows, secret passages, and a genuine sense of unease that the previous entries lacked. Tina Fey plays an American mystery writer who lures Poirot out of retirement, while Michelle Yeoh commands the seance as a medium who may or may not be the real thing. The confined setting, a single night in a single building, gives the film a claustrophobic intensity that suits the material. Branagh trades the globe-trotting scale of the earlier films for something smaller and stranger, and the mystery is better for it.