Starring: Kenneth Branagh, Kyle Allen, Camille Cottin, Jamie Dornan, Tina Fey, Jude Hill, Ali Khan, Emma Laird, Kelly Reilly, Riccardo Scamarcio, Michelle Yeoh
OUR RATING: ★★★½
Story:
Mystery horror thriller sequel directed by Kenneth Branagh. Set in eerie, post-World War II, Venice, Haunting in Venice (2023) follows a now retired Hercule Poirot (Kenneth Branagh) living in self-imposed exile in the world’s most glamorous city. After Poirot reluctantly attends a séance at a decaying, haunted palazzo, one of the guests is murdered, the detective is thrust into a sinister world of shadows and secrets.
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Best Quotes
Vitale Portfoglio: Monsieur Poirot, there is a lady here. She says she’s in Venice on urgent business. She says she’s a friend of yours.
Hercule Poirot: I don’t have any friends.
Ariadne Oliver: Hercule Poirot really has gone silent. Walled himself up into retirement. Cakes for cases.
Hercule Poirot: I am much satisfied.
Ariadne Oliver: No. This is happiness, not satisfaction. A writer knows the difference. Even picked Venice to hide in. A gorgeous relic, slowly sinking into the sea, just like your mind without a challenge.
Ariadne Oliver: Don’t underestimate me for a clever turn of phrase. I am the world’s number one mystery writer. Or was, anyway. Bestsellers, twenty-seven of thirty books. Damn the critics on the last three. Called them all small beer.
Ariadne Oliver: Time to put some life back into your life.
Hercule Poirot: Well, then.
Ariadne Oliver: Did you not hear? This is urgent.
Hercule Poirot: You are not the first who has come to seduce me with some irresistible case.
Ariadne Oliver: Not a case. It’s much spiffier than that.
Ariadne Oliver: We Americans imported loud music and terrible chocolate, but we also brought back Halloween.
Ariadne Oliver: Poirot, I’ve found something. Someone. I can’t explain it. I’ve looked at it from every which way, and I can’t figure it out.
Hercule Poirot: You are up to something, my friend.
Ariadne Oliver: I tell you, this Ms. Reynolds, I sat at a séance. Things happened.
Hercule Poirot: Tricks.
Ariadne Oliver: I am the smartest person I ever met, and I can’t figure it out. So, I came to the second. I need Detective Poirot to pop this balloon or God help me, I will end up a believer. Spot the con I can’t.
Vitale Portfoglio: In Venice, we say, “Every house is haunted or cursed.”
Puppet Show MC: Plagues make people afraid and fear makes people do terrible things.
'Scary stories make life less scary.' - Ariadne Oliver (A Haunting in Venice) Share on X
Leopold Ferrier: Games are frivolous. The Halloween calls for horror stories.
Olga Seminoff: You’re my favorite author. Your mysteries give me faith the wicked will meet justice.
Ariadne Oliver: Sadly, life doesn’t round out so well as detective fiction.
Ariadne Oliver: [referring to Rowena] Everyone who ever lived here falls victim to some tragedy. That’s the legend, anyway. The Children’s Vendetta. Someone sees a child’s shadow on the wall, and then darkness comes. Like her daughter a year ago. That’s who we’re to hear from tonight. The lost girl from beyond.
Hercule Poirot: I will not believe in such things.
Ariadne Oliver: We’ll see.
Rowena Drake: You care to bob for an apple, Mr. Poirot? It looks like fun.
Hercule Poirot: The fun is not for me.
Hercule Poirot: You believe in psychics?
Rowena Drake: This house made me believe. It holds voices. Whispers. Sobbing.
'The help always have motive, first having to endure to be called “the help”.' - Hercule Poirot (A Haunting in Venice) Share on X
Rowena Drake: My daughter, to hear her voice again. A word. I would give that Ms. Reynolds all I have.
Joyce Reynolds: This one will be very sad.
Joyce Reynolds: Ariadne Oliver. My nemesis.
Ariadne Oliver: We meet again. The unholy Ms. Joyce Reynolds.
Joyce Reynolds: The press coined that one. Not sure if I like it.
Hercule Poirot: I must say that I expected someone more…
Ariadne Oliver: Dramatic? Ridiculous?
Joyce Reynolds: An old crone?
Hercule Poirot: Yes, this is the perfect word. The croney. The old croney.
'The truth does not come without a tax of effort.' - Hercule Poirot (A Haunting in Venice) Share on X
Joyce Reynolds: I didn’t ask to be what I am. Why I like the term “medium”, sort of middling. I’m not big or small. I’m not interesting at all. But I can talk to the dead.
Hercule Poirot: I am Hercule Poirot.
Ariadne Oliver: You were Hercule Poirot.
Joyce Reynolds: The detective. You’re anything but medium. You’re quite famous. Am I your next quite famous case?
Hercule Poirot: I am retired from cases.
Joyce Reynolds: But you are here to discredit me.
Joyce Reynolds: You don’t believe in the soul’s endurance after death.
Hercule Poirot: I have lost my faith.
Joyce Reynolds: How sad for you.
Hercule Poirot: Yes, it is most sad. The truth is sad.
Hercule Poirot: Please understand, Madam, I would welcome, with open arms, any honest sign of devil, or demon, or ghost. For if there is a ghost, there is a soul. If there is a soul, there is a God who made it. And if we have God, then we have everything. Meaning, order, justice. But I have seen too much of the world. Countless crimes. Two wars. The bitter evil of human indifference. And I conclude, no. No God. No ghosts. With respect, no mediums who can speak to the them.
Joyce Reynolds: [as suddenly the large chandelier in the next room drops] You were saying?
Ariadne Oliver: [referring to the chandelier crashing] Well, still a charlatan?
Hercule Poirot: A ceiling weakened by water damage, unused to rollicking footsteps.
Ariadne Oliver: No credit for theatrical timing.
'Humans are so desperate to shape chaos into tidy stories, double that in distress.' - Maxime Gerard (A Haunting in Venice) Share on X
Maxime Gerard: A séance? Christ in a hat! Is that what this is?
Joyce Reynolds: You’re not scared of ghosts?
Leopold Ferrier: I talk to ghosts here all the time.
Joyce Reynolds: Do you?
Leopold Ferrier: They say you’re a fake.
Joyce Reynolds: Too many spirits. This house is spilling with the dead. Some souls can’t let go.
Joyce Reynolds: [in Alicia’s voice] Murderer! You killed me. You killed me.
'We cannot hide from our ghosts. Whether they are real or not, we must make our peace with them. And live life. Somehow.' - Hercule Poirot (A Haunting in Venice) Share on X
Vitale Portfoglio: We can’t prove any of it was real.
Ariadne Oliver: Then, what was it?
Maxime Gerard: Showmanship. Theater. Catching us in a group hysteria.
Ariadne Oliver: That wasn’t War of the Worlds on the radio. The damn doors blew open. I can’t explain it.
Rowena Drake: I can. That was my daughter.
Ariadne Oliver: Oh, no! Don’t you dare leave without saying it. You saw what I saw, and what you saw…
Hercule Poirot: Was fake!
Ariadne Oliver: Real. That woman is proof. Living proof. There’s a title. Sure as hell, she’s my next book. And sure as hell, it’s a hit. A big beer book. Good God. I have to start writing right away. The woman who stumped Hercule Poirot.
Hercule Poirot: I admit I cannot solve all of her methods in this moment, but of course I will.
Ariadne Oliver: You won’t! Come on. You should be relieved. And how incredible to believe. To know the world has mystery. A God who cares enough to make abiding souls. After death comes…
Hercule Poirot: Nothing.
Ariadne Oliver: Something.
Hercule Poirot: If there is a God, he would not break his rule for her.
'You woke the bear from his sleep. You cannot cry when he tangos.' - Hercule Poirot (A Haunting in Venice) Share on X
Joyce Reynolds: These spirits were particularly savage. Sittings always exact a price.
Hercule Poirot: As I’m sure do you. You are amongst frauds, the gifted one.
Joyce Reynolds: I wish I was a fraud. Be less painful. I think you know something of this, monsieur. Someone dies and we comfort the grieving with secrets plain to us. Both creatures who speak for the dead, who know the dead too well, I think.
Joyce Reynolds: I saw a murder.
Hercule Poirot: Did you see who killed Alicia Drake?
Joyce Reynolds: It was not revealed. Maybe tomorrow.
Hercule Poirot: A lucrative convenience.
Joyce Reynolds: Death everywhere you went. All your life. Soldiers. Friends. Katherine. We shall not meet again.
Hercule Poirot: You persist that you are real.
Joyce Reynolds: And if I’m not, who’s getting hurt? Magic won’t come unless you call it in, unless it really is all true.
Joyce Reynolds: [to Poirot] Lighten up, pal. You might have fun. I’d say to remember me, but you will.
Leopold Ferrier: Some things can’t be seen.
Maxime Gerard: [referring to Reynolds] You still think she’s real? Please. She made up that murder idea to impress a famous author, and to bait the hook on a new income stream.
Ariadne Oliver: Then, why is she dead?
Maxime Gerard: Gravity.
Olga Seminoff: Hateful things live in this house. That woman called to them. And they answered.
Hercule Poirot: A medium boasts of having a vision of murder. Now, she is dead. One of you felt her eyes upon you. Killed her. Tried to kill me. No one should leave this place until I know who.
Hercule Poirot: You will all have your chance to speak. And call back the police. Tell them Hercule Poirot is on the case.
Ariadne Oliver: Don’t you dare look at me like a murder suspect. We are old friends.
Hercule Poirot: Every murderer is somebody’s old friend.
Ariadne Oliver: I knew you were in there somewhere. All it took was a corpse and look at you. Hercule Poirot all over again.
Hercule Poirot: This palazzo you believe is haunted, yes?
Olga Seminoff: Ms. Rowena may own it, but the spirits possess it.
Olga Seminoff: What is it that you do?
Hercule Poirot: What is it that I do? When a crime has been committed, I can, by application of order and method, and the slow extinguishing of my own soul, find without fail or doubt, whodunit.
Olga Seminoff: [to Ariadne] Like in your books, your silly detective from Finland, he’s making lists. Do you base yourself on her writing?
Hercule Poirot: You who fear the dark arts so, why would you even attend a séance? An abominated act here at night, when you are loath to remain?
Olga Seminoff: There’s only one to whom I must answer. And that is not you.
Hercule Poirot: Battle scars are not always of the body.
Dr. Leslie Ferrier: There is no such thing as psychic phenomena. There is psychic pain. A loony like me should have known.
Hercule Poirot: The terrifying Edgar Allan Poe. For a boy your age, it is not better perhaps, Charles Dickens?
Leopold Ferrier: He’s a bit silly. Don’t you think?
Leopold Ferrier: [to Poirot] My father’s jumpy like you. They call it war neurosis. Battle fatigue. I think that’s unfair. He’s not tired. He’s broken.
Hercule Poirot: I am afraid, I do not know myself tonight.
Leopold Ferrier: You’re feeling things. Voices. It’s All Hallows Eve. The dead are as close as they can be. You were dead too, sir. Even if only for a moment. They see you as one of their own. One with something to say would be wise to come to you.
Hercule Poirot: You have much sympathy with the dead.
Leopold Ferrier: Some of them are my friends.
Hercule Poirot: If the police can succeed where I cannot, I will be the next one off the balcony into the canal.
Ariadne Oliver: Back to his old self.
Ariadne Oliver: My money’s on the housekeeper. Good taste in books, but brimstone fire burns hot. And Rowena Drake needed the victim alive. Although that little boy, all the charm of chewing tinfoil.
Hercule Poirot: Perhaps. Perhaps. Every theory aspires to fact before the information is gathered. Order and method.
Ariadne Oliver: And lists.
Ariadne Oliver: Do you really think the help had motive?
Hercule Poirot: The help always have motive, first having to endure to be called “the help”.
Ariadne Oliver: You’re doing that thing where you pretend to know more than everyone else in the world.
Hercule Poirot: I as yet know nothing. The truth does not come without a tax of effort. You woke the bear from his sleep. You cannot cry when he tangos.
Ariadne Oliver: That’s not an expression in any language.
Hercule Poirot: We continue.
Hercule Poirot: [referring to the noise] It comes from the basement.
Rowena Drake: There is no basement in this house.
Dr. Leslie Ferrier: [to Poirot] I should have listened. I saw. Demons, evil, they’re everywhere in this house. You and me, we’re the same. Wherever we go, death follows.
Hercule Poirot: There must be a rational answer for all of this. In the basement, there are bees. Upstairs, there is an ordinary killer.
Dr. Leslie Ferrier: No. Listen. Believe.
Maxime Gerard: A haunted house? Humans are so desperate to shape chaos into tidy stories, double that in distress. It isn’t a wash of a trillion stars, it’s old Cassiopeia. That blur of light in the family photo? That must be Grandad’s ghost.
Ariadne Oliver: [to Maxime, referring to his engagement to Alicia] So, you broke it off and broke her heart. All because a woman made you feel small.
Hercule Poirot: It is good to have a friend in this. How long have we known each other?
Ariadne Oliver: The Canning Road Municipal Baths Murder. I bullied my way into observing you as research for a book. Wrote Poirot thinly veiled. They saw through it, and you got famous. Infamous.
Hercule Poirot: I almost died. Here. This palazzo, it plays tricks. It puts things in front of me again and again.
Hercule Poirot: Mediums and magic. Ghosts and gods. Fame for the medium, a percentage to you, your literary standing restored. “The woman who stumped Hercule Poirot.” Not Joyce Reynolds but Ariadne Oliver.
Ariadne Oliver: Won’t you forgive me?
Hercule Poirot: Apparently, only God can forgive.
Ariadne Oliver: Bit of a pickle then.
Hercule Poirot: The personal invitation to the fiancé?
Ariadne Oliver: Guaranteed drama with that one.
Ariadne Oliver: Three flops, I needed a win.
Hercule Poirot: We were friends.
Ariadne Oliver: You don’t have friends. You have admirers. And you only have them because of me. I wrote you up as a genius. Why shouldn’t I use you to sell books? Genius. You’re a fool. An ego. A black cloud that lures death. And you know it too. That’s why you quit.
Ariadne Oliver: Come on, leave him. Let the detective detect. He already knows. He’s going to come to it soon enough.
Ariadne Oliver: [to Poirot] For once in your life, admit that you are up against something bigger than you.
Hercule Poirot: Tonight, we are all afraid. There have been two impossible murders. Each murder appears committable only by phantom, as if the living have been killed by the dead.
Hercule Poirot: I must consider Ms. Reynolds assistants. Survivors, desperate and threatened. The ex-police-commissario who has been in this house before, each time death occurs. The authoress, determined, capable, murderously clever. Our avenging angel, Olga Seminoff, so keen on justice as she prescribes it. The former love full of rage for the doctor, and only the fragment of a photograph to remember such happiness. But there has been a third death, which explains the other two. The murder of Alicia Drake committed by her mother. Her murderer. A mother who killed her own child, then killed twice more to hide her terrible sin.
Hercule Poirot: All night, I am hearing, seeing things which are not there. I begin to believe in the impossible presence of ghosts. When in fact I had been doped, drugged with an hallucinogenic poison.
Rowena Drake: [referring to Alicia] No. I would never hurt her. It was an accident. She was my whole life.
Olga Seminoff: You poisoned her.
Rowena Drake: To protect her.
Maxime Gerard: To control her!
Rowena Drake: To keep her safe from you.
[then after Rowena runs off, Alicia’s ghost seems to appear to pulls her off the balcony and into the canal to her death]
Maxime Gerard: [to Poirot, referring to Alicia] She was the best thing about me. And if there is a soul, you gave hers peace.
Hercule Poirot: Rowena Drake presumed the blackmailer was the fake medium or the family doctor, when it was neither. Only the doctor’s son saw the truth.
Leopold Ferrier: You solved the case. But you had help, didn’t you? You heard her.
Hercule Poirot: Bonne chance, my friend.
Leopold Ferrier: Don’t worry, people who die in this house always come back. I’ll see them again. See you soon, Dad.
Ariadne Oliver: I won’t apologize. You’ve ruined my book. Neither living nor proof. I have to rewrite the whole thing.
Hercule Poirot: So long as it does not include my name.
Ariadne Oliver: I never want to hear your name again.
Ariadne Oliver: Just a house now. All debunked. But you’ve got the look of a believer. You did. You saw something.
Hercule Poirot: I was under the influence. My subconscious mind assembled facts ahead of the rational.
Ariadne Oliver: You saw. You know.
Hercule Poirot: I know only that we cannot hide from our ghosts. Whether they are real or not, we must make our peace with them. And live life. Somehow.
Ariadne Oliver: And how will you live your life?
[we then see Poirot returns to his home, appearing to have his faith restored and accepting a new case]
