BEYOND OUR KEN

A HAUNTING IN VENICE The 'tec with the 'tash grapples with the ghostly in Kenneth Branagh's third Poirot outing.

- JAMIE GRAHAM

He solved a Murder on the Orient Express. He got to the bottom of a Death on the Nile. A Haunting in Venice, though, may finally be a match for Hercule Poirot and his little grey cells in Kenneth Branagh’s third starry helping of Agatha Christie mystery.

Director-star-producer Branagh and screenwriter Michael Green stuck with the tried and tested for the first two instalments of what has now become a trilogy of vehicles for the former’s take on Christie’s canny Belgian. (Both Murder and Death were famously filmed in the 1970s, with Albert Finney playing Poirot in the first and Peter Ustinov taking over in the second.) With A Haunting in Venice, however, they have gone decidedly off-piste, opting instead to adapt a far more obscure entry in the canon: 1969’s Hallowe’en Party, a country-house whodunnit of middling repute whose most noteworthy feature – beside a cameo from Ariadne Oliver, a fictional writer of detective stories generally considered to be Aggie’s alter ego – is the affectionate dedication it contains to author P.G. Wodehouse.