Hercule Poirot Has a New Case

Who would have predicted Hercule Poirot would become one of the Disneyfied Fox’s biggest film franchises?

I certainly wouldn’t have. And yet here we are, about to get our third Poirot film in the last six years directed by and starring Kenneth Branagh as Agatha Christie’s famous detective. (The other two were 2017’s Murder on the Orient Express and 2022’s Death on the Nile.) The latest, dubbed A Haunting in Venice (based on the Christie novel Hallowe’en Party), features Poirot investigating yet another murder, and sleuthing his way through yet another all-star cast, this time including Jamie Dornan, Tina Fey, and recent Oscar winner Michelle Yeoh.

You can check out the first A Haunting in Venice trailer below — which works very hard to make this Poirot mystery look more like a horror film than a detective story:

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On the one hand, it’s sort of fun to see Poirot a little outside his usual genre. On the other hand, if the trailer is making the film out to be more of a ghost story than it is, that would be disappointing. Here is the film’s official synopsis:

“A Haunting in Venice” is set in eerie, post-World War II Venice on All Hallows’ Eve, “A Haunting in Venice” is a terrifying mystery featuring the return of the celebrated sleuth, Hercule Poirot. Now retired and living in self-imposed exile in the world’s most glamorous city, Poirot reluctantly attends a séance at a decaying, haunted palazzo. When one of the guests is murdered, the detective is thrust into a sinister world of shadows and secrets.

A Haunting in Venice is scheduled to open in theaters on September 15.