Teresa Reviews the Disappearance of Mr. Davenheim (2005)

Teresa Reviews the Disappearance of Mr. Davenheim (2005), but she kept being distracted by the better Suchet version.

(c)2025 by Teresa Peschel

Fidelity to text: 4½ thieves

Minor differences to accommodate Maybelle and let Oliver find a clue.

Quality of movie: 3½ thieves

I shouldn’t have, but I kept comparing this to the much better Suchet version.

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

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

One of the advantages of anime is the possibility of showing misty, gorgeous, evocative watercolor landscapes, and this series frequently delivers them. Here, the watercolors include Mr. Davenheim’s home, which looked very much like other, white modernistic houses I frequently saw in the Suchet Poirot episodes, and of his rose garden. It’s spectacular.

Which is why I couldn’t understand why Inspector Sharpe was suspicious of Mr. Lowen wandering out to examine an unusual rose while he was killing time waiting for Mr. Davenheim. I would have gone out to gawk at those roses! Anybody would! Mr. Davenheim’s rose garden puts the roses at the Hershey Botanical Garden to shame. That’s the advantage of watercolor; the flowers are lush and perfect, fill vast gardens, and there’s never a weed or sign of black spot or insect damage. Difficult to do when filming in a real garden.

Anyway. The film follows the text closely, other than when Maybelle, Hastings, and Oliver visit the Davenheim estate to collect clues for Poirot. He remains, as per the bet with the police inspector, sitting in his office like Nero Wolfe and thinking over what he’s told. Despite being an orchid fancier, Nero Wolfe would have appreciated Mr. Davenheim’s roses.

While hiking around the boathouse and the lake, Oliver spots the critical clue which everyone else, including the police, must have somehow missed: Davenheim’s jacket laying on the shore. Is Davenheim dead?

No, which Poirot realizes when he learns that the Davenheims have not shared a bedroom for nearly a year. This leads him to the truth: garden-variety fraud behind a clever cover-up.