A Haunting In Venice - new Poirot leaves Dame Agatha far too far behind

An adaptation of an Agatha Christie which rides quite so roughshod over the original really oughtn’t to be quite as enjoyable as A Haunting In Venice proves to be.

Director Kenneth Branagh – who is also, of course, our Poirot – takes Halloween Party and heaps heresy upon sacrilege upon outrageous disrespect. This is an adaptation “based on” in the sense of “has virtually nothing to do with”, and yet in the end, there’s no doubting it really is rather good.

Dame Agatha Christie famously wrote 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, and so far Branagh had done two of them – a decent Murder On The Orient Express and a fairly ropey Death On The Nile. Which leaves a huge array of them for him to reproduce faithfully. After all, Dame Agatha knew precisely what she was doing; barely wrote a duff one (until her final years); and understood exactly how to plot and pace. And yet for his third Poirot outing, Branagh has decided to pick an obscure one and rip it up almost entirely.

True, he has been faithful to the names at least. But the little girl who casually drops into the conversation the fact that she saw a murder many years ago without actually realising – until now – that it was a murder has become a charismatic medium who apparently discovers a murder when she connects with a dead soul during a séance.

And while the little girl meets a sad fate when someone drowns her in an apple-bobbing tub at a Halloween party, here it’s actually Poirot who gets the dunking in an apparent attempt on the great detective’s life. But most challengingly of all, the whole thing is uprooted from a quaint English village to a darkly-forbidding, crumbling palazzo in the heart of Venice.

It should be appalling, but it absolutely isn’t. There are elements of horror here which go way beyond anything Dame Agatha would ever offer, but it’s also an exceptionally clever mystery which unfurls most pleasingly – convoluted and a bit confusing, but at the same time intriguing and huge on creepy atmosphere.

Tina Fey is maybe the biggest stumbling block. Whatever Tina Fey is or might be, she certainly isn’t Ariadne Olivier. But maybe it’s best just to try to forget she’s carrying a name so steeped in Agatha Christie legend.

Against that, the greatest delight is Branagh’s Poirot. Branagh took an awful lot of getting used to in Murder On The Orient Express, but in this one, while pretty much everything else has been tossed in the air and reimagined, this is the film perhaps when Ken gets closest to the great man.

He gives us a Poirot who has determinedly retired and yet who is drawn back into detection; a man who is utterly trusting in his little grey cells (though he is careful not to call them that here), but a man who is deeply unsettled by the supernatural world that seems to be engulfing everyone in their locked-in sinister palazzo.

But let’s not be too generous. Making Poirot a World War One veteran in Death On The Nile was a massive step too far. Some things just cannot be forgiven…