Teresa Reviews “Death on the Nile” (2022)

Teresa reviews “Death on the Nile” (2022), Kenny Branaugh’s second Agatha Christie adaptation, and was distracted by the unreal all-CGI film.

Fidelity to text: 3 handguns

Unneeded Poirot backstory, character consolidation, badly run ship, and the cast never went near Egypt.

Quality of film on its own: 3 handguns

Gorgeous to watch, wonderful to hear, and tedious to sit through waiting for something to happen.

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

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

If you’ve heard of the novel or watched the previous two versions, you know that Death on the Nile largely takes place onboard the paddle ship Karnak, cruising down the river. It’s right there in the title. Truth in advertising.

Not here.

That ship is fake.

It’s a gorgeous fake — built on a sound stage in England — but it’s not a real ship, subject to wind and weather and Egyptian heat. It can be done! The Ustinov film (1978) was filmed onboard the paddle ship Memnon. The Suchet version (2004) took place onboard the steamship Sudan (still in service today and you can sleep in the Agatha Christie suite). The closest the cast got to real water is a waterpark in the Cotswolds, but I admit those ’30s vintage wooden powerboats are very nice.

Unfortunately, Sir Kenneth Branagh, our director and star, wants to have every single aspect of the film under his complete control. Like Orson Welles, he clearly believes that a film set is the best toy a boy could have and he takes full advantage of the possibilities. It’s his movie. It’s his choice. But that doesn’t mean I have to like it.

Faking the ship is on par with how he shot the movie. It’s gorgeous, but virtually nothing you see is real other than wardrobe. All that scenery? Sound stages, CGI, and green screens. Any sweat you see on the cast was misted on by the film crew. If Sir Kenny had shot in Egypt, he would have had problems, no question. It’s doubtful the authorities in charge of those fabulous archeological sites would have permitted him to film as he chose, ranging all over like they did in 1978. Moreover, it would be much harder to make the Nile’s banks look like they would have in 1937, when the action takes place.

But when everything’s CGI, it doesn’t feel real. It was too perfect, too polished, too gleaming, too flawless. Each shot was beautifully composed to be symmetrical and when it was asymmetrical, it was still symmetrical. About the only things that were unsymmetrical were the fish and the crocodiles and they might have been fake too. Even one murder’s blood splatter on the wall looked like some set designer painted it on, dot by dot.

The film’s perfections made me look for imperfections and I found them. Salome Otterbourne (Sophie Okonedo) became a black blues singer. The movie came to life when she sauntered onscreen. Her character is based on Sister Rosetta Tharpe who pioneered a gospel fused, guitar-based music. That’s Sister Rosetta’s voice you’re hearing. She played an electric guitar but in 1937, she was 22 and electric guitars weren’t widely available and there certainly weren’t any with cords so long she could strut onto the floor of a nightclub.

The nightclub dancing scene was wrong too. People have always enjoyed suggestive dancing (it’s the most fun you can have standing up according to my sister, an accomplished ballroom dancer) but Jackie and Simon were dry-humping on that dance floor. Moves like that were reserved for whorehouses, not nightclubs. Then to watch Simon rub his face into Linnet’s crotch when they were dancing? Taxi dancers show more restraint.

It felt forced and wrong watching Simon and Linnet dry hump on the facade of Abu Simbel (a scene the Egyptian authorities would have refused, thus another reason for a sound stage). Perhaps the boring simulations of lust were supposed to compensate for the complete lack of chemistry between Linnet and Simon.

It felt not just wrong but insane for the crew to leave the ship every night and camp out on the shores of the Nile! I refuse to believe that any competent captain or his cruise director would leave the passengers — who expect luxury accommodations and on-call services at all hours — alone overnight, getting into mischief in the engine room or the bridge.

The crew abandoning the ship every night led to the ridiculous scene where Poirot pursues the suspect who slit Louise’s throat and shot Bouc through the empty galley. Except that there’s boiling water on the stove and live steam running through the pipes. Who’s boiling that water and running the engine? Ships don’t run themselves.

There’s also the fact that neither Poirot nor the suspect aren’t sweating or even breathing hard after that mad chase up and down and all around.

And how did Simon Doyle warn his partner in the first place that Bouc was about to spill the beans about what he saw?

There was no set-up, none, to explain why Poirot took Euphemia Bouc’s case to investigate her son’s infatuation. In my experience, while Poirot likes matchmaking, he doesn’t do what amounts to divorce work. Spying on Bouc’s would-be wife? He should have said something to Bouc to explain why he took such an out-of-character case.

Why did Euphemia Bouc launch into a diatribe about the evils of love and marriage? What’s the relationship between her and her husband, Bouc’s father? There’s not a single word of explanation for why Euphemia married Bouc’s father, bore him a son, and then left. Nothing. That rant came out of the desert with less warning than a sandstorm.

The fatal change was revamping Linnet’s character. I know why Sir Kenny did it. He didn’t want Gal Gadot playing the real Linnet; a woman who’s a hyper-capable, self-absorbed control-freak, and completely unable to understand that other people have rights, including the right to make a mistake. For Linnet, other people exist solely to fulfill her every wish. We’re all extras in her world. In the novel and the two previous films, Linnet’s not a sympathetic character. Keep in mind that Jackie’s about her only friend, the only person in the world who doesn’t care about her money.

So what does our new, improved, more sympathetic Linnet who can have anything she wants in the world do when Jackie introduces her to her fiancé, Simon, and asks that Linnet give him a job? She steals her best, her only friend’s man and then self-justifies her actions.

Does Sir Kenny’s Poirot lecture her with Nathan’s parable to King David about the rich man craving the poor man’s ewe lamb despite being richer than rich and having everything when the other man had nothing? As a good Catholic, Poirot knows the story. Sir Kenny didn’t say a word, which was wrong.

I don’t feel much sympathy for this Linnet. Worse, I don’t understand why this suddenly nicer, kinder Linnet stole Jackie’s man in the first place. Simon is a handsome lunk, no question. But Linnet can afford handsome lunks far more easily than she can afford losing friends. I really don’t understand why this Linnet went after Simon when they had the magnetic allure of dry sand.

You won’t either. This is a beautiful, perfect, perfectly flawed film. Watch either of the other two versions to see real people, not simulations.