Death on the Nile (2022)

Kenneth Branagh returns to the Nile with a mustache, a murder, and the quiet determination of a man who has decided that the 1930s are a fine place to spend an afternoon. The film is a period mystery in the old mode: a glittering steamer, a honeymoon interrupted, a detective with a sad backstory bolted on in a prologue at Yser. It is handsome, it is slow, and it is content. The Nile here is a backdrop for cocktails and resentments, not a subject. Nobody worries about the river.

The ensemble has been diversified with intent. Sophie Okonedo, Letitia Wright, and Ali Fazal occupy prominent roles that Christie's 1937 original did not imagine, and the film makes no comment on this whatsoever. Which is, in its way, the more interesting choice. Race exists on screen as a fact of the passenger manifest and never as a theme. The women, likewise, do most of the scheming and most of the suffering, but they are mystery archetypes first: the spurned lover, the manager, the nurse, the heiress. The machinery of the genre turns, indifferent to any larger argument.

What the film declines to do is lecture. There is no sermon on the river, no environmental lament, no redistribution of the Ridgeway fortune beyond the mechanics of the will. Money motivates the killings, and the film regards it as a fact of gravity. The bodies are all conventionally shaped. Poirot's fastidiousness reads as eccentricity, not diagnosis. History is a backdrop, not a thesis. This is a relic, and it knows it. Its only cause is the puzzle, which it pursues with the grim courtesy of a man checking a pocket watch.

A note on the ledger: the picture is a sequel, a second adaptation of a familiar novel, and it opened at number one before settling into a respectable, unremarkable haul. It asks nothing of us but attention, and it rewards that attention with a corpse and a handkerchief that has faded to the wrong color. There are worse transactions at the cinema. There are also better ones, but they rarely come with this much linen.