This film, currently in cinemas, is the third in a series based on Agatha Christie’s character Poirot. The series is produced and directed by its lead actor, Kenneth Branagh. Given the rationale for this series of posts, you’ll be unsurprised that I haven’t seen the others.

I did, however, read a lot of Poirot in my youth, and my mum and I would often watch the David Suchet adaptation together. I was surprised, therefore, that I didn’t recognise the plot of A Haunting in Venice: only afterwards did I read that it was based on Hallowe’en Party, a novel to which the film’s plot has only the most passing resemblance.

The film opens with Poirot in retirement in Venice—that’s new—when a friend and writer played by Tina Fey visits. The twinkle in Fey’s eye made me sit back in my seat: ’they’ve got this,” I thought. They’d clocked the fact that the Poirot series is essentially ridiculous, and needs to be treated with a knowing lightheartedness. Death is no more than a puzzle, the investigation no more than a riddle to be solved. They’ve understood that.

Reader, I was wrong. Far from treating death lightly, the writer has decided to make one character suffer post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. We’re so far from funny that we’re literally discussing the Holocaust.

But it’s okay because Fey will be along with a genuinely funny one-liner about Poirot’s idiosyncratic phraseology shortly.

This is a film that gave me whiplash. It seems to try to combine the lightest, silliest approach to death—spearing on a classical statue, drowning during apple bobbing—with a deep-seated reflection of the horror and trauma of war. It’s a deeply peculiar oil and water combination.

Just to add to the confusion, the film is imbued with something adjacent to horror. There are classical horror tropes in here—jump scares, weird cinematography, haunting noises—but it doesn’t feel like the film is intending to make these moments genuinely frightening. It’s almost like it is hinting in that direction, as though someone’s realised that juxtaposing cheap scares with the horror of war is a little insensitive.

This wasn’t a terrible film: overall, I found it fairly enjoyable. I certainly preferred it to Sound of Freedom and Gran Turismo. But my overriding thought as I walked out of the cinema was: ‘well, that was odd.’