A Haunting in Venice (2023)

Kenneth Branagh returns for a third time as Hercule Poirot, now retired in post-war Venice and pried loose from his exile by a séance he intends to debunk. The palazzo is damp, the Halloween décor is ominous, and someone ends up impaled on a statue. It is a mystery picture with a ghost story folded in, conducted with the weary elegance of a man who has solved too many of these and would like to go home.

The ensemble is notably international, drawing players from Malaysia, France, Britain, Italy, and elsewhere, though the film treats this as ordinary period-piece casting instead of a statement. Women carry much of the plot: the novelist who lures Poirot out, the opera singer whose grief anchors the house, the medium who may or may not be a fraud. The killer turns out to be a possessive mother, which is a fine twist and not an argument about anything. No character wrestles with patriarchy. None is asked to.

Elsewhere the cupboards are bare. There is no romance beyond the heterosexual kind, no racial reckoning, no climate anxiety, no critique of the wealthy patrons who fill the palazzo, no body-image discourse, and no neurodivergence narrative, since the boy who hears voices is hearing actual ghosts and the traumatized doctor is simply a veteran of the war. Grief and shell shock are atmosphere here, never instruction. The film wants to unsettle, not lecture, and for that restraint it deserves a quiet nod.