Retired but brilliant Poirot solves a murder in Venice

From the magical city of the 80th Venice Film Festival to the eerie setting of the third film, actor and director Kenneth Branagh took from the pen of Agatha Christie to once again take on the role of the famous detective Hercule Poirot. On Friday 15th at 21:00 the Politeama cinema in Pavia will reopen its doors with Murder in Venice, a suspenseful supernatural thriller based on the novel Poirot and the Massacre of the Innocents, published by the queen of crime fiction in 1969.

The film, which will be released the day before at the Movieplanet cinemas in San Martino Siccomario and Parone, as well as at The Space in Montebello, will then be repeated in double mode (18:00 and 21:00) on Saturday 16 and Sunday 17 numbers and at 21:00 on Tuesday 19th. (in original language with subtitles) and “Wednesday 20”. The story takes place on the eve of All Saints’ Day in troubled post-World War II Venice, where the famous detective Hercule Poirot (Branagh), now retired and in self-imposed exile, now resides. But even though he does his best not to think about crimes, crimes will naturally come to him. One day he is visited by his old friend, the world’s number one mystery writer Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey), who asks him to join her for a séance at a decadent and sinister mansion owned by famous opera singer Rowena Drake (Tina Fey). Kelly Reilly). Poirot, intrigued by the request, reluctantly agrees and, when one of the guests is killed, he will search among everyone present for the culprit, ending up doing something he no longer wanted: detective work.

“In this film we see an already tormented Poirot,” said Branagh. “He has witnessed too many crimes, he has lived through two world wars, he has seen the cruelty of people towards other people, and he has had enough, but, as we saw in In other films, underneath the detective’s tough exterior lies a poetic and romantic side: part of him wants to have something to believe in.” For this new adaptation – following Murder on the Orient Express (2017) and Murder on the Nile (2022) – Kenneth Branagh gave a couple of artistic licenses to screenwriter Michael Green, who, bordering on the paranormal, chose to reduce the number of characters and move the action of the story from England to Venice, which “with the innate ghostliness of the fog made history frightening beyond the imaginable.”Giacomo Arico