Teresa Reviews “A Promise of Death” (2021)

Teresa reviews “A Promise of Death” (2021) (aka (Shi to no Yakusoku; Appointment with Death)

Fidelity to text: 4½ syringes

It’s all here, including what other adaptations got wrong.

Quality of film on its own: 5 syringes

What a gorgeous film, deeply heartfelt, and the Japanese setting enhances the story.

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

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

I never know what to expect and now that we’re watching foreign adaptations of Agatha — which is to say not English or American — I know even less. English and American cultures are not the be-all and end-all of how stories can be told. While human beings tend to want the same things the world over (a meaningful life, children and family, status, and a secure place in the world) how they express those desires varies from culture to culture. What one culture finds perfectly acceptable is anathema to another.

Then there’s also the issue that even though many, many talented people make a film (it’s art by committee!), the film may still be bad. David Suchet’s version of Appointment with Death is a stellar example. Despite the experienced and talented cast and crew, that version was awful. Heaven only knows why the writer and director made the choices they did.

So how was the Japanese version? Amazingly good and I say this despite the poor quality of the film itself (Bill had trouble getting a clean copy) and having to rely on subtitles. Agatha’s family dynamics translated beautifully. The transfer to 1955 Japan made Lady Westholme’s crime even more understandable and tragic.

I’m going to stick with the English names for the characters because I and you, dear reader, are more familiar with them.

Let’s start with our new Poirot. This is Mansai Nomura’s third outing as the character but our first look at him. I don’t know why his three Agatha Christie films aren’t readily available on DVD but they aren’t. He’s a very different Poirot, even comical at times. But he still wants order and method and he’s still the smartest person in the room. It’s possible that his droll personality helps set him apart from the rest of the culture. I don’t know. He’s funny but there’s no doubt that the other characters take him very seriously.

Except Lady Westholme. That’s the major change to the plot other than the new setting. When she appears onstage, it turns out that she and Poirot know each other, but not because she’s an important politician. No, a flashback makes clear that they met when he arrested her sometime in the early 1930’s. She was a skillful jewel thief in the Ginza and Poirot, a young policeman at the time, managed to catch her. She served her time and took full advantage of the chaos during and after the war to change her name, reinvent herself, and marry an up-and-coming politician. Lady Westholme’s a widow, she completely remade her life, and she left her past behind her.

When Poirot asks Lady Westholme about what she’s telling her ghostwriter (a great version of Amabel Pierce) helping write her autobiography, she responds she’ll only admit what’s necessary. She’s forgotten the past and expects Poirot to do the same.

Except the past never stays buried. Lady Westholme can’t outrun her past when she meets the one person who not only knows who she was but who would revel in torturing her over it, endlessly.

That’s the great tragedy at the climax of Promise of Death. Lady Westholme remade herself into a better person and a champion of women in Japanese society but Mrs. Boynton craved a new victim and didn’t care. Mrs. Boynton wanted to humiliate Lady Westholme and she succeeded. Lady Westholme chose suicide rather than flee and reinvent herself again or be publicly and permanently dishonored.

If you think English culture is concerned with status, appearances, and saving face, they’re toddlers playing in the sand compared to the Japanese.

But new life can be born out of tragedy and that’s the other thing this film did so well. Mrs. Boynton is one of Agatha’s great villains. She’s an expert in psychological torture. She doesn’t need to lay a hand on her unfortunate children and this film demonstrates her sadism well. It also shows the effect she had on her children. They look like adults (other than Ginevra), but they behave years younger. They’re frightened mice in a way they weren’t in the Ustinov version.

Nadine was handled perfectly. She’s Lennox’s wife. She loves him but he’s become more dead than alive. He’s given up hope and is waiting for either his mother to die or for him to die. Nadine’s good friends with Jefferson Cope but unlike the Ustinov version and exactly as in the novel, they’re friends. Only friends. They are not conducting an adulterous affair. This Jefferson Cope loves Nadine. He loves her enough to want her happiness over his and when she chooses to stay with Lennox, after Mrs. Boynton’s death, it breaks his heart but he lets her go.

As Poirot conducts his interrogations of the Boynton family, peeling back layer upon layer of deception, he proves to the children and Nadine that they love each other deeply and they are worthy of love. They all lie, but not to protect themselves. They lie and assume the blame for Mrs. Boynton’s death to protect each other.

There are some great, funny set pieces that circle back around into something more. Lady Westholme playfully pushes Poirot down a grassy slope.

She pushes him again down a steeper, wooded hillside to buy herself time. Then she leaps to her own death, because Mrs. Boynton won.

There are also tengu. They’re a type of spirit, come in many forms, but the one you’ll see here is more traditional, with a red, long-nosed face and garbed in white. Tengu might not harm you but then again, they might if they feel like it. Like similar European spirits, they’re capricious. Seeing one means you should be wary.

During Poirot’s summation of who could have killed Mrs. Boynton, you’ll see each suspect attack her with a syringe while she tries to beat them off with her cane. And that includes the tengu that Ginevra and Jefferson Cope saw. Was there a real tengu? Yes, there was.

Poirot’s deductions proved him to be the smartest person in the room. He saw that Amabel Pierce was unreliable, parroting whatever the last person said to her. He recognized that if a member of the Boynton family wanted to kill her, they’d do it at home where it could be more easily disguised as a heart attack.

And most of all, he saw what no one else saw: that Mrs. Boynton did something wildly out of character. She took the family on vacation to give them false hope and make them more miserable than ever. But then she let her family off their leash so she could sit alone on a bench in front of a shrine while they enjoyed some freedom. Why did she do this? Poirot knew she’d spotted a fresh victim.

What a great, great movie. Don’t miss it.