MOVIE MUSIC UK

Original Review by Jonathan Broxton

A Haunting in Venice is the third adaptation of an Agatha Christie novel by director Kenneth Branagh, after Murder on the Orient Express in 2017, and Death on the Nile in 2022. It’s also, by quite some significant margin, the worst. It’s very loosely based on Christie’s 1969 work Halloween Party and sees the Belgian master detective Hercule Poirot living in semi-retirement in Venice, when he is convinced to attend a Halloween party by his old friend novelist Ariadne Oliver; also at this party will be a supposed psychic medium, Joyce Reynolds, and Ariadne wants Poirot to help her unmask Reynolds as a fraud. However, as the night unfolds, Poirot gets drawn into a sinister plot involving murder, hidden family secrets, and a supposed curse of ghostly children haunting the palazzo where the séance takes place. The film stars Kenneth Branagh as Poirot, Tina Fey as Oliver, and Michelle Yeoh as Reynolds, plus Kelly Reilly, Jamie Dornan, Jude Hill, and Camille Cottin in supporting roles.

While all this sounds promising on paper, the film is undermined by a number of utterly baffling creative decisions by Branagh, who is usually one of my favorite working directors. Firstly, he chose to have his film shot by cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos using a bizarre array of unconventional camera angles and fish-eye lenses, which I guess was intended to create a sense of unease and surreality for the audience, but instead for me just made things confusing and annoying as I was constantly being made to feel slightly queasy by the movement and framing. Second, this brilliantly talented cast just seemed bored by the whole experience; with the exception of the more animated Fey, everyone speaks in a hushed monotone throughout the film, barely emoting, barely moving any facial muscles, simply moving from dusty room to dusty room muttering to each other. Even the reactions to the murders are weirdly muted, to the extent that nothing feels shocking, nothing feels scary, and the climactic revelation of whodunnit is met with a shrug. It’s as if Branagh thought that lighting rooms with candles, having actors whispering in gloomy corridors, and occasionally throwing a parakeet at you, or having a door unexpectedly slam, is what constitutes atmosphere, and nothing else was needed.

However, for me the most baffling creative decision Branagh made was in regard to its score, which was written by the everything-winning Icelandic composer Hildur Guðnadóttir. Branagh had famously, over the course of his entire career, fostered a magnificent creative partnership with composer Patrick Doyle, who prior to this had scored all Branagh’s feature directorial efforts except Peter’s Friends in 1992 (which essentially had no score), the low-budget In the Bleak Midwinter in 1995, the 2006 adaptation of The Magic Flute (which used Mozart’s music), and the 2021 drama Belfast (which was scored mostly with rock songs and pop instrumentals by Van Morrison).

The reason for Doyle not scoring A Haunting in Venice is not entirely clear. Doyle was working on a commission for King Charles III’s coronation during some of the time the film was being made, but that ended up being just a four-minute piece and as such clearly wouldn’t have precluded him from working on the film too. At the Film Music Festival in Krakow earlier this year Doyle, when asked this question directly, simply said that Branagh ‘chose a different composer,’ and did not elaborate any further. Branagh was also reportedly playing music from Guðnadóttir’s previous scores on set while filming, to give the cast some ‘spooky ambiance,’ so I can only surmise that Branagh got overly-attached to Guðnadóttir’s music at this point, and decided that that was the musical approach he wanted his film to have. As I said, for me, this turned into a terrible creative decision.

It’s no secret that I don’t like Hildur Guðnadóttir’s music very much. Joker is the only thing of hers that I thought worked in any way. My review of Chernobyl is there for everyone to read – I’m not going to rehash it again here – but I couldn’t muster the energy to review Sicario: Day of the Soldado, or Tár, or Women Talking, so make of that what you will. I really don’t enjoy writing negative reviews of film music, especially when the music is written by as lovely a person as Guðnadóttir is, and even moreso when the music is written by one of the leading voices for women in film music. I am hugely in favor of having women be given the same film music opportunities as men, and it frustrates me no end that the most acclaimed and high profile woman right now is the one who is writing the music I like the least. But, I will do so if I have a larger point to make, and this is the case here. I have to be fair, and as such I am very disappointed to say that, for me, A Haunting in Venice was a complete musical failure.

In an interview with Jazz Tangcay for Variety Guðnadóttir explained her thinking and says “Typically, for this genre, you’d have a big orchestral score, but Ken wanted to have it quite close and small from the get-go.” She continues, “I scored it with a solo clarinet and that automatically draws your attention because it’s closer and smaller. I don’t think the audience realizes this, but it changes your perception because you’re expecting something else. That smaller tone and the silences are super important for those jump moments.”

However, I personally think that this is a film that cried out to be bathed in rich, Gothic music. The faded opulence of the crumbling palazzo in which the film is set, the atmospheric mystery of the mist-shrouded Venetian canals on a dark Halloween night, the ghostly séance, spurned lovers, sinister motives, the overarching tragedy of dead children… this is a delicious playground for a composer to explore, so much tantalizing potential. Instead we get… nothing. I don’t mean that there is no music, because there is music in the film, and sometimes you can even hear it, but the music that is there does nothing, says nothing, offers nothing. It has little to no effect on anything that is happening on-screen, and what effect it does have usually makes the film worse.

Consider this; in one scene, you see a visually striking sequence of Poirot, Ariadne, and Poirot’s security guard Portfoglio arriving at Rowena Drake’s palazzo in a trio of gondolas, each one steered by a gondolier dressed in black, wearing a skeletal white mask, similar to those worn by plague doctors, crossed with a traditional Venetian bauta. It’s dark, the canals are encircled with mist and fog, the buildings are covered by long shadows. There is a sense of anticipation, perhaps a little fear, on the faces of Poirot and his friends as they pass under bridges, snaking through the serpentine backwaters of the city. You can almost hear the music in your head – dark, moody, romantic orchestral lines that reflect the eerie beauty of the city in this light, but which also have a sense of foreboding.

So what does Guðnadóttir do for this scene? She has someone gently blow into a clarinet for almost three minutes… and that’s it. That’s literally it. It’s the cue “Gondolas” on the soundtrack album. And it absolutely ruins the scene in film context, because it doesn’t illustrate any of the emotions or overarching ideas in the scene. It’s just a scene of three boats, and the reason it’s *worse* is not because you can’t hear the music, but because you can *just* hear the music and you realize that this was the creative decision they made in this moment – that *this* was the music they wanted to use to set the scene, and it completely fails at its task. The music is so subtle and so understated that it basically serves no purpose; it would almost have been better if there had been no music at all, and they scored the scene with ambient noises of water lapping on the gondola’s hulls.

This is just one of several instances I could mention like this throughout the film, where Branagh is clearly wanting to convey a certain emotion to his audience, but Guðnadóttir’s music for the scene is either inaudible (so it has no impact in the scene), is audible but so bland and ephemeral that it also essentially has no impact in the scene, or is audible but imparts the wrong emotion onto the scene due to a shocking lack of appropriate contextual application. This latter element comes into play most obviously during the fistfight scene between Jamie Dornan’s character Dr Ferrier and an American guest, Maxime Gerard, played by Kyle Allen. It’s quite a shocking moment, as it’s the first real moment of action in an otherwise staid and talky film, but Guðnadóttir scores it with a weirdly comedic scherzo for strings and clarinet that immediately deflates the tension, undercuts any sense of danger, and almost makes it funny rather than exciting. Wrong emotion, wrong contextual application. It’s the cue “Pipes” on the soundtrack album.

The rest of the score is barely anything. It’s wispy and insubstantial, almost completely lacking in identifiable thematic content, with no dramatic development, and no sense of narrative or storytelling. It’s just there, essentially existing as an inferior alternative to silence, but offering nothing to latch on to. I say that the score is *almost* completely lacking in identifiable thematic content, because there is a recurring idea – a slow, mournful, meandering set of cello textures – that plays in the opening cue “Haunt,” and then later in several cues in the film that are not included on the album, but it’s so anemic and underwhelming that it barely registers as a theme.

“Alcoven” is little more than three minutes of atonal overtone breath sounds. “No Music Without Her” has some vaguely classical violin noodling, quivery and agitated, but it never comes close to properly depicting the sense of loss Kelly Reilly’s character Rowena Drake feels for the death of her daughter. “Séance” is loud and shrill and at times aggressively atonal, with loud clarinet outbursts and string stingers. “Psychic Pain” is just a series of dull string harmonics, scraping a bow across a cello for almost three minutes before wavering away into nothingness. “St. Louis” is mostly the same, but adds in the woodwinds. The “Confession,” which in previous Branagh-Poirot films has been the emotional catharsis and score highlight, is again little more than a wavering, wandering cello, and it often just drifts off into silence rather than highlighting the revelations in the film’s finale. The conclusive “Money in the Mattress” is four minutes of slow, extended orchestral textures, again just wandering along aimlessly, and then the album ends.

Are there positives to the score? Perhaps. It’s more tonally appealing than most of Guðnadóttir’s previous scores, which some may appreciate, and it certainly has more meat on its bones than anything in the score for Chernobyl. Some of the actual performance techniques – like the clarinet overtone blowing – are noteworthy as being perhaps a little different. And I suppose that anyone who is more into minimalist contemporary chamber music than I am may appreciate its restrained nature in terms of the album listening experience, and may recognize some ideas and textures from the modern concert hall. Personally, I’m just glad the album is only 35 minutes long.

My biggest concern in all of this is that mainstream film critics will fall over themselves to praise it, and yet again reinforce the current prevailing notion that in order to be taken seriously film music should mostly be devoid of melody and clear emotion, and stripped down to its barest essentials. The film critics at Indiewire loved the score, of course, while the Washington Post called the score “elegiac” (it isn’t). I am at a loss. To me, A Haunting in Venice is a huge disappointment. It’s not interesting from a musical point of view, it doesn’t offer anything new or challenging – in fact, this is an example of Guðnadóttir staying very firmly within her cello texture comfort zone – and the album listening experience comes close to being boring. It has little to no impact on the film in context, mostly because it is barely audible, except for the few moments when it does, and then it invariably makes the film worse. All I hope is that, after this brief dalliance in Iceland, Kenneth Branagh comes to his senses and re-teams with Patrick Doyle on whatever project he tackles next.

Buy the Haunting in Venice soundtrack from the Movie Music UK Store

Track Listing:

• Haunt (3:45)
• Gondolas (2:47)
• Alcoven (2:52)
• No Music Without Her (2:46)
• Seance (1:48)
• Psychic Pain (2:53)
• St. Louis (3:09)
• Pipes (2:13)
• Confession (8:14)
• Money in the Mattress (4:19)

Running Time: 34 minutes 51 seconds

Hollywood Records (2023)

Music composed by Hildur Guðnadóttir. Conducted by Robert Ames. Performed by The London Contemporary Orchestra and Nomad Ensemble. Orchestrations by Robert Ames. Featured musical soloists Hildur Guðnadóttir, Galya Bisengalieva, Jonny Byers and Max Welford. Recorded and mixed by Sam Slater and Francesco Donadello. Edited by Richard Armstrong. Album produced by Hildur Guðnadóttir and Sam Slater.