Teresa Reviews A Haunting in Venice (2023)

Teresa reviews A Haunting in Venice (2023) and enjoyed this spooky adaptation of Hallow’een Party.

(c)2024 by Teresa Peschel

Fidelity to text: 2 drowning victims

The names match. There’s a Halloween party. A chunk of Nemesis forms the true motive.

Quality of movie: 4 drowning victims

I hated Ariadne Oliver’s motivation. I refuse to believe it. A better motivation for her, and I’d have given the film a higher score.

Read more of Teresa’s Agatha Christie movie reviews at Peschel Press.

Also, follow Teresa’s discussion of these movie on her podcast.

Scriptwriter Michael Green, who wrote Kenneth Branagh’s two previous outings as Poirot put serious effort into rewriting Hallowe’en Party. But the names match as do much of their characters. Joyce Reynolds is still a liar (although not as much of a liar as Poirot believes). Leopold, while no longer Joyce’s brother, is still a creepy, snoopy kid, and a blackmailer. A magical garden plays a central, fatal role because gardeners know how to convert a living person into a dead one.

And Rowena Drake? If you know Hallowe’en Party, you already know what she did even if the script fools you into believing differently. And Green does it by using the core motivation at the heart of a decidedly non-Poirot property, the novel Nemesis (1971) which starred Miss Marple.

Cast your mind back to that novel and remember how Miss Marple had to untangle who murdered Verity Hunt. Was it her lover and fiancé, Michael? With whom she was prepared to run away with and then disappeared, leaving him to face murder charges? Or was it someone else, someone who couldn’t possibly be guilty? Remember Clothilde Bradbury-Scott, the woman who raised Verity, who adored Verity to the point of obsession. She wanted her Verity to remain, always, her own little girl, kept close at home and not permitted to marry some unsuitable young man and have a life of her own away from Clothilde’s control.

That story forms the heart of Haunting. Note very carefully how Rowena is described by other characters, especially her relationship with Alicia, her dearest daughter without whom she could not sing. Rowena herself tells you how close they were. She was so distraught over Alicia’s death she kept her room as a shrine, untouched except for dusting it and feeding Alicia’s cockatoo.

Maxime, Alicia’s lover, backed out of their marriage because he knew Rowena would be the controlling monster-in-law from hell, eager to break them apart. But he adored Alicia so much, he chose to brave the gorgon again to win her back, was stonewalled by Rowena, and blindsided by Alicia’s suicide. A year later, engaged to another woman, Maxime rushes to Venice because an anonymous invitation arrives promising information about Alicia. He’s almost as obsessed as Rowena.

Along with the neglected cockatoo and her housekeeper, Olga (who refuses to stay after it gets dark) Rowena’s household includes her shell-shocked doctor, Dr. Ferrier, who attended to Alicia during her illness. He remained in Rowena’s Venetian palazzo because he’s got nowhere else to go, and he’s hopelessly in love with Rowena. Not that she pays him or his far-too-old for his years son, Leopold, much attention. Dr. Ferrier may have been a good doctor once but he’s a shell of his former self, missing, as Poirot notes, the obvious. But his son doesn’t miss the obvious. Not Leopold.

You wonder what Leopold will grow up to be. At about 10, he’s reading Edgar Allan Poe. He correctly, based on dad’s notes, diagnosed Alicia’s true illness, but he admits he was helped by knowing Rowena’s first starring soprano role when she became a famous opera singer was Aspasia.

Aspasia is the queen in Mithradate, re de Ponto (1770) by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791). Mozart based the opera on the life of Mithradates the Great, also known as the Poison King. Mithradates (135-63 B.C.) ruled the kingdom of Pontus. In addition to successfully fighting off the Romans, he slowly, over time, developed an immunity to various poisons. He still died by poison because you can’t develop an immunity to everything. Leopold implies Rowena learned about the mad honey because of her role in the opera. The honey, made from nectar collected from Rhododendron ponticum, has been known since ancient times as a powerful hallucinogenic. It’s closely regulated, but available (albeit expensive) if you know where to go.

When Alicia threatened to run away with Maxime, freeing herself from her mother’s influence, Rowena ripped out their magical rooftop garden and replaced the flowers with white rhododendrons brought back from Turkey. The resulting honey which she spoon-fed to Alicia to control her wasn’t ordinary wildflower honey anymore.

Rowena’s obsessive, controlling love for Alica drives the plot. She’s being blackmailed over Alica’s death but doesn’t know by whom (this is right out of the novel). She’s got two possibilities: Joyce Reynolds, the infamous medium who’s been writing to her, and Dr. Ferrier, who’s in her household and privy to many of her secrets. She’s forced into hosting the Halloween party, followed by the séance where Joyce will channel Alicia’s spirit. Or someone’s.

One of the more interesting parts of this very gothic horror film is guessing what’s real caused by spirits and what’s been faked by phony mediums and their assistants. The palazzo is supposedly haunted by plague-ridden children locked in to die by their doctors and nurses during the Black Death plague in the mid-14th century.

Joyce the medium fakes the typewriter, but she doesn’t fake Alicia’s voice. That’s someone else speaking. Similarly, she didn’t fake spinning around in her chair. But Poirot, now a good atheist, ignores the spinning chair as though this is another one of his honey-induced hallucinations. Yet other people see it.

Leopold admits he sees and speaks to the ghosts haunting the palazzo. Olga doesn’t speak to the ghosts but she’s afraid of them. Whatever is haunting the palazzo uses amazingly specific hallucinations to encourage Poirot to reach his conclusions, including spelling out the letter “M” in running water on the kitchen wall. He sees and speaks to a ghost who turns out to look exactly like Alica as a young girl. He also sees (but doesn’t admit this) an adult ghostly Alicia drag her mother over the balcony. The implication is that someone used the means at hand to push him to the logical, rational conclusion.

What wasn’t rational about the film was Ariadne Oliver’s motivation for luring Poirot to the villa. I can live with Tina Fey’s portrayal but here, she’s claiming they’re not friends? That Poirot has no friends? That she, despite being a successful mystery novelist, needs to fake her plots by following Poirot around and then fictionalizing them? That she needed to set up this elaborate to the point of Byzantine conspiracy to get Poirot into the Drake household, complete with fake medium, faked séance, and getting the only ex-cop turned bodyguard in Venice who knew the household to play along?

I couldn’t buy it. If this Ariadne Oliver can make up a plot like that, she doesn’t need to shadow Poirot. She didn’t make him into a household name. He was already a household name, based on the two previous films we’ve seen! Aargh.

This is what would have worked: Ariadne, Poirot’s dear friend, is deeply concerned about him hiding himself away in Venice. She, knowing him well, senses a deep, existential despair that can only be cured by getting him back on the job, solving other people’s dilemmas. Thus, the Byzantine plot to get him involved in a mystery he can sink his teeth into, a mystery of the human heart.

She knows him well and when Poirot complains to her about her scheme, keep this in mind: He didn’t have to permit his bodyguard to open the door and let her inside his sanctuary. He could have refused.

But he didn’t. He made his choice.