A man with his back to the world waits for two impossible and perfect eggs. He follows an officer to the transport as a dream-generated locomotive leaves the story. He dreams of a holiday in Egypt and wakes up in the gnarls of memory’s black and white world; his famous face is shaped by loss and pain and the costume to cover its origins. And he sits at a table at the end of the world, a man less in tune with his time or any but adrift in no-time. He begins in retirement. He ends in acceptance. His name is Hercule, though nearly every face in his world calls him “Poirot.”
These snapshots are the respective entry points and exit ramps for Kenneth Branagh’s detective protagonist in the so-far three films the director-actor has made that feature him. Branagh’s Poirot films occupy an increasingly strange place in the increasingly weird ecosystem: the twenty-first century metroplex. Murder on the Orient Express (2017) entered an economy still starry on the possibilities of IP-mining, as top-grossing films of that year exclusively feature Disney properties and pop culture products as heroes. Death on the Nile (2022) appeared to an industry in the throes of its latest crisis, ravaged both by pandemic-induced closures and delays as well as the burgeoning sense that the terrain of our memories handled at the hands of slick corporate storytelling might not be a sustainable model of cultural dispensation. Indeed, several of the top-grossing films of 2022 feature the same trademarks from five years prior (Batman, Thor, the Minions) while folding in “new” revisitations (Avatar, Top Gun, Puss in Boots). Nile’s release, like so many films shot in the wilderness of late 2019 and early 2020, was pushed and pulled like taffy, a cultural object in search of distribution in an industry increasingly at the mercy of corporate conglomeration, content optimization, and a boring spring towards the moral and artistic middle.
There are the conditions, however reductively summarized, that A Haunting in Venice (2023) enters into. Certain sure-fire invocations no longer feel certain, as superhero properties continue to be released to limited returns and legacy-rattling gong bombs like The Little Mermaid and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny fail to stick to any body. There is perhaps renewed faith in the act of mass-moviegoing. Something like The Super Mario Bros. Movie exists to assure studio bosses that the bottom hasn’t completely fallen out of leveraging consumer memories for profits while spectacle darlings Barbie and Oppenheimer remount a case for the Spielberg model: get a truck’s ton of money into the hands of an engaged creator and market the ensuing object into Armageddon. People will come. But even at such a moment of possible optimism, corporate studio bosses sell their studios off for parts, feel increasingly antagonistic to the business of moviemaking itself as they withhold tentpole volumes (Dune: Part Two) and pop arthouse faire (Challengers) as false-leverage against the striking labor forces they openly antagonize. Just at a moment when it might feel—as the ads go—that the movies are back, uncertainty rears ups. Branagh’s Poirot, more than Suchet’s or Ustinov’s or any other incarnation that spanning multiple years, is a detective challenged not only to navigate the changing conditions of a given mystery on hand but also the fickle, plastic moods of time itself.
Why read Poirot against his filmic ecosystem? While nominally as well-known a commodity as Bruce Wayne or Stephen King’s Derry, MN, the detective and the detective story are not as inevitably part of cultural production as the superhero or horror film. And even as other ventures have followed the audience’s appetite—Knives Out (2019) and its whole orbit of detective stories to follow, on television and in cinemas—these Poirot adaptations are less compelled by building a cohesive mystery to be wondered at and solved in real-time by an audience than they are in sketching observations about humanity itself, treacherous as that task may be. And directed as they are by Branagh, this Poirot is a man out of time at least twice, not quite in step with the trends of movie-making in the early 21st Century nor fully integrated into the narrative world of the early 20th the character exists in. This disjointment would be worth investigating if any actor had taken on the role and willingly entered into the tradition of reviving Hercule Poirot. With Branagh, it’s somehow personal.
Poirot’s reintroduction to a mass audience—and by this formulation, I perhaps mean people for whom the cinematic or televisual memory of Poirot looms larger than the literary one—signaled Brangh’s insistence on operating like he’s always operated when in auteur mode. He’s an unfussy workman making handsome the unexceptional, one-part theatrical romantic to one-part bring-it-in-on-time technician. The auteur vulgarian can write it atop his filmography: fold in sturdy Shakespeare adaptations among a dalliance with early-90s/ late-2000s studio pictures, let harden into hack-for-hire at Marvel, Disney, Skydance, or any contract job—remember Artemis Fowl (2020), the movie you can’t see?—and balance with the occasional ego-freakout of All is True (2018) or Belfast (2021). The three Christie films, taken alongside his presence large and small in three latter-day Chris Nolan films, form something like the midpoint in Branagh’s Act IV.
An ungenerous read of this tract of cultural history would point to its weary non-exceptionality. It’s a laundry list of adaptations and revivals, usually shot unimaginatively and conceived of adjacent to dull literalism—here a Hamlet, uncut and untouched, there a Cinderella, again as always. Curiously, Branagh’s readiest aesthetic contemporary is Ben Affleck, himself an underrated actor whose trajectory through making pictures places him, alongside Branagh, Zelig-like in and alongside so many of the market trends that define our current metroplex ecosystem. Both men operated on “the superhero picture” close to its inception point, a little into the first wave for Affleck in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016) and near-primally in Branagh’s Thor (2011). There are the blatant awards pictures that won awards—Argo (2012), Belfast (2021)—and the blatant awards pictures that didn’t—The Tender Bar (2018), All is True (2018). There are the product-minded cinema objects of Cinderella (2015) and Air (2023) and a chewy sense of history as object—My Week With Marilyn (2011), Live By Night (2016)— and a variable focus on the violence men inflict on women that yielded both actors’ finest performances in years in Tenet (2020) and The Last Duel (2021). Beyond their resumes, though, it’s their own relationship to their past that feels of a type, both men having as they do a specific directorial relationship to antiquated period of studio production as in Branagh’s early literary adaptations and Affleck’s crime tales. Despite their presence as stars in the same galaxy as so many other galactic events (Oppenheimer, say, and Jennifer Lopez), the two artists operate in something like fringe territory. They possess none, for whatever it’s worth, of the slick sheen that dominates the pop object in 2023.
Like Affleck, Branagh is unique in his status as an actor first even with his long directorial resume. He’s undoubtedly a talented actor, or rather, an out-of-step talent. His every instinct is to play dramatic situations big rather than fall into aspirational realism. Compare Branagh’s Hamlet to Hawke’s or Cumberbatch’s, his Thor to any of the lackluster irony bombs that follow: rather than seeing character or mythology as an opportunity to impose a psychology, Branagh always chooses to chase an emotional trail. He gets inside by getting out of himself. He acts. Such an action juts out in memory, as we recall his near-expressionist work in Tenet as nearly animated differently than the rest of the terrain, dominated as it is by serial under-sellers and throat-talkers. He plays to the big back wall of our brain, which at the metroplex means his work can feel outsize, or at least uncalibrated. I confess: there is perhaps nothing more refreshing in our quadrant-minded cinema of mid-taste non-bombs than to experience the uncalibrated. “How all occasions do inform against me,” a Dane once remarked, “and spur my dull revenge.”
Branagh’s Christie movies contain their creator’s natural hand. They are comfortable knots of contradictory data. They are minor and contained—this Poirot is no Guy Ritchie action hero—and feature co-stars as likely to be poached from an analytics office’s sheet of trending bodies (Josh Gad, Gal Gadot, Kelly Reilly) as they are from Branagh’s theatrical and aesthetical past (Judi Dench, Jennifer Saunders, Jamie Dornan). Only Murder on the Orient Express introduces an in-universe complication to Poirot’s status: will he look past his resolute conceptions of logical justice—the “little grey cells,” the “order and method”—in holding a community of righteous murderers accountable? Introduced in this first installment are the ensemble’s reactions to Poirot’s level of fame, some recognizing (as we do) his image and vast mustache, some seeing a mythology instead of a man. Sometimes they get his name wrong, equate him with a Hercules, cause the detective to reassert his identity: “Hercule Poirot. I do not slay the lions.”
What does Hercule look like de-Poiroted?How does our treatment of the character that Branagh portrays change if we conceive of him as a ‘Hercule’ (a man seeking to define himself by will) instead of a ‘Poirot’ (a man given a title by time)? Something reorients in Hercule’s cathartic decision to let the community theater of murderers walk free at the end of Orient and in doing so, sends the myth and man into a crisis in Death on the Nile, first in the corridors of memory—can a man be more than the mustache we know him by?—and then history itself. Rather than reading Belfast as the memoir text, it is Nile that presents the actor-director (the meaning-seeker) as a bored and boring veteran hoping to use his senses to make narrative out of lies and half-truths. It would be insulting of Branagh to metaphorize his role as a journeyman filmmaker as an expression of Hercule’s own search for self-meaning. Neither man is interested in the poetic mode, preferring as they do the actorly aplomb of Shakespeare and Dickens. And so they do the only thing they know how to do—the work. The title mortality of this second film, then, is of a version of Poirot. The film leaves the image of familiarity sitting unhomely by himself at a table in the dark. That kind of self-writing would be tragic if it were compelling, but Branagh’s never been clever enough to shoot for compulsion. It’s this lack of cleverness—itself a sharp entity that often shades ironic or worse, despairing—that in 2022, is enough to save the filmmaker from both resonance and ire as the grand mystery of art and work surround him. Inanity has a grace all its own. I suspect Kenneth Branagh will be a far more interesting Falstaff than many of us might have assumed he’d be.
Like Falstaff, he goes on until he doesn’t. And A Haunting in Venice sees the old ham indulging his baser instincts, piling on Dutch angles and downright Gothic creeps as happily at odds with the legacy horror of 2023 as they are sloppily integrated. The film also rearticulates the place an out-of-date player might have in the face of modernity, or a version of modernity. “I can only see the world as it should be,” Hercule confesses early in Murder on the Orient Express. “And when it is not, the imperfection stands out…It makes most of life unbearable, but it is useful in the detection of crime.” It’s not quite an aesthetic credence so much as an admission of the compulsion to make meaning out of living, Hollywood and hauntology all mixed up and coming out like community theater ectoplasm. It might be enough to crave a bit of pastry and conversation, to see yourself as an image in an image in a child actor. A detective directs, an actor detects. Honor need not enter into it.
