Whatever you think about whether there are actual ghosts in "A
Haunting in Venice," the characters are clearly haunted in other ways:
by war, by love, by failure. Here's how their tragedies all tie together.
Warning: Spoilers ahead!
"A Haunting in Venice" takes place in the fall of 1947, as the Italian "City
of Canals" undertakes a much-needed period of peace and healing following the end of
World War II. A retired Hercule Poirot enjoys the comforts of walks, pastries,
and perfectly prepared eggs, with seemingly no interest in being a detective anymore. That is,
until his old acquaintance, mystery writer Ariadne Oliver approaches him with a proposition.
Ariadne has been invited to seance at a local palazzo. The world-famous medium
Joyce Reynolds has been hired to contact the spirit of the late Alicia Drake,
a young woman who seemingly killed herself after a prolonged period of mental illness.
Alicia's mother Rowena, her housekeeper Olga, family doctor Leslie Ferrier,
and Alicia's ex-fiance Maxime Gerard are among the others in attendance. Upon Ariadne's request,
Poirot attends the seance to try and prove that Reynolds is a fake.
"Spot the con I can't."
He identifies some tricks in her act, but things get more serious when the
medium is thrown from a balcony and impaled on a statue below. As a storm besieges the palazzo,
Poirot locks the gates and begins to investigate. As he too begins to see
ghosts in the supposedly cursed house, he struggles to identify the truth.
As Poirot investigates the deaths of Drake and Reynolds,
he makes a number of shocking discoveries. He interviews the medium's assistants,
half-siblings Nicholas and Desdemona Holland. He also speaks with Dr. Ferrier,
who suffers from debilitating PTSD, and his creepy son Leopold.
Dr. Ferrier falls into a violent episode and is subsequently locked in the palazzo's nearly
soundproof music room for the supposed safety of all involved. Poirot deduces
that Ariadne was actually in cahoots with Ms. Reynolds the whole time. Along with Poirot's
bodyguard Vitale Portfoglio, who's revealed to be the police officer who found Alicia's body,
Ariadne helped Ms. Reynolds and her assistants rig all the tricks for the
seance. Her goal was to stump Poirot and make him admit to the medium's powers.
"Just admit that you are up against something bigger than you!"
Ariadne was planning to write a hit book about Reynolds to
return to the top of the literary establishment.
As Poirot interrogates Ariadne, Dr. Ferrier is found dead. The legend of
the palazzo says that it's haunted by the ghosts of orphan children who were killed
by brutal doctors and nurses. Some assume that Dr. Ferrier's death is
proof of the supernatural, but Poirot has another explanation. He reveals that the
grieving mother Rowena Drake is actually the one responsible for the whole bloody affair.
Alicia Drake suffered from a psychological illness after being dumped by Maxime. She
claimed to see ghosts in the house, but in reality, her affliction was nothing
supernatural. Jealous and terrified of losing her daughter to a husband,
Rowena caused the split and concocted a plan to keep her daughter by her side in perpetuity. Using
a special poison grown in her honey garden, she kept Alicia sickly and sedated by spiking her tea.
When Olga volunteered to watch Alicia for the night,
she unknowingly gave her a fatal dose of the drug. To cover up her evil deed,
Rowena threw her daughter off the balcony and left the mark of the "Children's Vendetta" on her,
invoking the supposed curse. She may not have meant for Alicia to die, but she willingly
harmed her for weeks, purely out of jealousy, and made it very easy for an accident to happen.
"She came back to tell me that she was murdered."
Poirot discovers that Rowena is being blackmailed by someone who knows her secret. After the seance,
she kills Reynolds and changes one of the clocks to give herself an alibi.
She either suspects that the medium is the blackmailer or fears that a second seance
will uncover the truth. It's eventually revealed that the medium was running
an entirely separate con. The blackmail of Rowena came from a much less obvious place.
Poirot briefly suspects that Dr. Ferrier was blackmailing Rowena,
the woman he loved, but who never returned his affections. His autopsy of Alicia should
have revealed that she died from poison, not drowning. But his actions weren't malicious.
The doctor's declining mental condition caused him to miss the obvious, or perhaps
he was blinded by love. That said, someone did notice the poisoning: Ferrier's son, Leopold.
The young boy was the one blackmailing Rowena, in a scheme to provide for himself and his dad.
After his father's death and the resolution of the case, the boy is taken in by Olga. He
laments what happened, but Poirot assures him that it isn't his fault. No child should have
to be a parent to their parents, and the scars of the war forced him into an impossible position.
Rather than keep the remaining blackmail money, Leopold and Olga decide to give
it to Nicholas and Desdemona so that they can travel to St. Louis, as is their dream.
Poirot explains that the death of Dr. Ferrier was an elaborate manipulation orchestrated by
Rowena Drake. The combination of intense PTSD and unrequited love for Rowena leaves
the doctor in a highly vulnerable state, and she convinces him over
the inner-house telephone to kill himself, making it look like a supernatural event.
There are a few different reasons why she does this. Rowena is clearly paranoid about
her blackmailer, and she may think it's the doctor, since he was the
one who performed the autopsy. Or maybe she fears that he will return to his notes after
all of the commotion and unearth the truth. Regardless, his isolated death makes a strong
case for the ghosts being real, which would theoretically absolve Rowena of culpability.
The doctor's death is perhaps the saddest in the whole film. Leopold tries so hard
to care for his father in a world that's utterly unprepared to deal
with the mental effects of the war. When he sees him lying dead, all he can say is,
"Why did he have to be alone?"
Ariadne Oliver isn't guilty of murder, but Poirot does catch her in a devious
scheme. She tries to use him as a tool in her literary comeback,
even bringing his bodyguard into the plan to help make Reynolds seem legit.
At the beginning of the movie, she tells Poirot that her last three books have been critically
panned. She also claims to be responsible for making the detective famous in the first place,
by publicizing an early case of his. She argues, then, that she has every right to use him. The
two don't exactly part on the best of terms, but Poirot doesn't seem to hold a grudge against her.
Ariadne is a mainstay of Agatha Christie's fiction and frequently served as a stand-in
for the author herself. Her arc in "A Haunting in Venice" is a good deal different from her
role in the book the film is based on, "Hallowe'en Party," but there is an
interesting connection. The novel received generally negative reviews upon release,
and was written off by many as proof that Christie was past her prime. It's
interesting to see Ariadne dealing with a similar dilemma in "A Haunting in Venice."
After Poirot catches Rowena in her lies, she confronts him on a balcony. As the storm rages,
Poirot catches a glimpse of what appears to be a ghost in the lightning. It's the shape of Alicia,
hanging in the air, looming behind her mother. In the next moment,
Rowena loses her balance and plummets off the balcony to her death. The audience and
Poirot are left to ponder if she was blown off by the wind or pushed by a spirit.
Poirot discovers that his own hallucinations around the house were caused by Rowena's
poisonous honey. Or were they? Leopold repeatedly says that he talks to the ghosts of children
in the palazzo. Some of them, he claims, are even his friends. He has no reason to
think that Alica's death was supernatural, but he insists that the haunting is real.
Is Poirot still being affected by the honey when he sees Rowena fall,
or does he actually see a ghost on the balcony? The secret basement of the palazzo confirms the
evil deeds and numerous deaths that took place there. Even Poirot can't explain the whole thing.
"Someone else is in this house."
Poirot leaves the palazzo the next morning a seemingly changed man.
He has a new passion for detective work and immediately returns to it,
accepting a case that was proposed to him in the opening scene. Why does a man so firmly in
retirement leap back to his old job after his experience at the palazzo? Maybe it's
because this particular brush with death makes him reexamine how he wants to live.
At the beginning of the film, Poirot openly admits that he has no friends, and it's
hard to imagine that solitude is always a good thing for him. Reynolds tells him at one point,
"We know the dead too well, I think."
Though her own powers as a medium are left ambiguous, Poirot seems to take
her statement to heart. His line of work is not a happy one, but it is a calling,
and he returns to it with renewed vigor. He seems decidedly driven to start actively living again.
"A Haunting in Venice" is a murder mystery and a ghost story, but it's also about the aftermath of
World War II. By moving "Hallowe'en Party" from its original English setting to Italy in 1947,
director and star Kenneth Branagh and screenwriter Michael Green reorient the focus.
Dr. Ferrier suffers because of the things he saw in the war, and this psychological wound
causes him to misdiagnose Alicia's cause of death. Because of his PTSD,
his son is forced to grow up extraordinarily quickly and become the adult in the family.
This pushes him to make the questionable decision of blackmailing Rowena instead of coming forward
with evidence against her. With his father unable to work, what choice does he have?
The Holland half-siblings are also scarred by the war. They want to go to St. Louis because
they saw it in a movie that the American soldiers who saved their lives showed them. Their whole
conception of a happy life is determined by their horrific experiences in war-torn Europe. There are
bigger ghosts that haunt the story beyond those said to be in the palazzo. Venice, Italy, and
the world at large are trying to pull themselves together after an unfathomable amount of violence.
The Hollywood labor union strikes prohibit writers and actors from marketing upcoming
projects, so there hasn't been much promotion from the cast and crew of "A
Haunting in Venice." But back in April 2023, before either strike had begun,
Kenneth Branagh did speak with The Hollywood Reporter about the film.
He couldn't say much about the movie's ending and spoil the surprises,
but Branagh did suggest some interesting things about potential sequels. When asked if he'd
faced studio pressure to unite his Poirot films under a single franchise title for marketing,
Branagh said he hadn't "thus far." His phrasing suggests that the director and star has plans
for even more Agatha Christie mysteries, which he seemed to confirm later on, saying,
"The movies are what they are, and if it evolves in a different way,
we'll cross those particular bridges when we come to them. But so far,
I've just been left to get on with the titles as they are."
That certainly leaves the door wide open for more Poirot cases on the big screen,
provided "A Haunting in Venice" performs well enough to justify them.
Branagh isn't the only one who sounds optimistic about more Poirot mysteries coming down the line.
Prior to the release of "A Haunting in Venice," executive producer James Prichard spoke with Total
Film about the possibility of more sequels set in Agatha Christie's mystery universe, saying,
"If Ken [Branagh] wants to do more, and Michael [Green] wants to write more, we'll certainly do
another. There's a lot of material still to go, so we're not going to run out of inspiration."
With Christie's whole library available for potential adaptation, Branagh's series could
indeed go on for as long as he wants, provided the box office returns are there. However, Prichard,
who is Christie's great-grandson and CEO of her literary estate,
emphasized that it's also important to keep things fresh, saying,
"If we are going to continue to make these films, we can't do the same thing over and over."
"A Haunting in Venice" is definitely a bit of a shift from "Murder on the Orient Express"
and "Death on the Nile," throwing the mystery more into the supernatural thriller category.
"Which is pretty exciting, because it involves him, and us, being scared."
It would also be great to see Tina Fey return as Ariadne Oliver. If audiences respond well to the
film and its many changes to Christie's work, future sequels could get even more creative.