The Haunting in Venice: A review
Watching this movie gave me goosebumps, literal and metaphorical.
Dark curtains drape the windowsills, covering cobwebs spelling a mystery ‘M’. Footsteps shuffle through the night as the voice of a young girl’s lullaby echoes along with the chimes of midnight. Whispers spread tales of a forbidden tea, mixed with dangerously poisonous honey. “Not wild flower”, so it seemed. The cockatiel looked on knowingly.
From the blends of symmetrical imagery in the meticulously thought-through arrangements of objects (pumpkins, newspapers and teacups, the like) in the film setup to the carefully measured distances between characters as they interact with the menagerie of shadows in the haunted mansion, the film crew did an amazing job conveying everyday humour, symmetrical harmony and balance in the cinematography.
Everything is placed in an order to convey a vintage sense of harmony among the elements of scenes from start to finish. An example that is striking is the appearance of Poirot’s balcony and the change in items occupying its space in the beginning and the end of the film: A mundane pumpkin with the daily newspaper at the start, to notes on the latest murder case with a teacup placed precariously near the edge of the table, a playful hint at the possibility of another supernatural encounter akin to the haunts in the mansion where his teacup broke on its own accord mysteriously.
Never would one imagine the lengths to which motherhood may stretch – to the edges of insanity and possession of pure narcissism. With the overlay of symbols hinting at the ultimate culprit, Branagh guides the viewer through clues deftly as one lures rabbits through a trail of zig-zagged traps, each welcoming the other as carefully placed pieces of a puzzle. At the beginning we are given the clue of ‘M’ – to which many possibilities abound from Maxime, the ex-fiance of Alicia, to Maria, her housekeeper, and the last person we would ever suspect – her very own mother. Meanwhile, rainwater spill through unseen cracks along pots on the wall to spell the letter ‘M’, hinting over and over again the identity of the murderer. We are guided back incessantly to the element of water, which ties together all the points of the plot – water, the environment in which Alicia’s body was found, and the source of the dangerous toxins that poisoned her in her teacup.
“Mother, I’m thirsty”, Joyce had said under the trance of Alicia’s ghost, hinting at the source of her ailments – the poisoned tea.
In the bathroom, a frequent scene where Poirot heads to clear his thoughts and save time for his own detective thinking, illusions of water being clogged in the pipes, kept from him yet overflowing the next after sudden glimpses of her ghost in the dusty mirror fill the scenes, bringing us back again to the element where it all started.
As the age-old adage says, blood is thicker than water, and can transcend all bonds. It is no wonder the cold hands that pull Rowena to the depths of her demise are none other than her daughter’s, the same hands that pleaded her for help when she cried, “Mother, I’m thirsty…I don’t want to die”.
Indeed, blood is thicker than water.
Some sins are darker than ink, stained by blood and the ties that come with it. As Poirot puts it, we cannot run from the demons in our hearts, but can only make peace with them, and live life the best way that we can. How do we do so it depends on each individual. For some the way has been shut.
There’s no doubt about it, this movie deserves a solid 10/10. If only there were an edition without the cut scenes out in cinemas today.
The Writing Den 