Kenneth Branagh's third Poirot film is the best of the three — darker, stranger, and more willing to let the atmosphere do the work that dialogue might otherwise rush to complete. A Haunting in Venice is set in a decaying palazzo on All Hallows' Eve, and Branagh shoots it like a horror film that has remembered, at the last moment, that it is also a mystery.
Poirot here is a retired man who has decided to stop believing in himself. He is not the preening, confident detective of Murder on the Orient Express. He is haunted — by the war, by the bodies, by the endless human capacity for violence that his career has forced him to witness. This Poirot is interesting in a way the earlier versions were not.
The séance sequence is genuinely unsettling. Whether you believe in what it depicts or not, Branagh shoots it with a commitment to dread that the previous films never attempted. Michelle Yeoh, as the medium, is magnificent — theatrical in exactly the way the scene demands, without tipping into camp. Tina Fey, cast against type, holds her own.
The mystery resolves conventionally — the supernatural explanation retreats, the human one advances, Poirot's little grey cells prevail. But A Haunting in Venice earns its resolution because it has genuinely unsettled you on the way to it. Agatha Christie adaptations rarely manage that.