A Haunting In Venice (12A, 103 mins)

Verdict: Clunky melodrama 

Rating:

Bolan’s Shoes (15, 95 mins) 

Verdict: Platform for excellence

Rating:

The question that shimmered over Kenneth Branagh’s last movie adaptation of an Agatha Christie novel, 2022’s Death On The Nile, was not so much whodunnit as why-make-it?

It wasn’t as if his first effort, Murder On The Orient Express (2017), was much cop. Actually, to be more accurate, it was too much cop. As the mighty Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, Branagh scarcely seemed to leave the screen, ’amming up ze accent for all he was worth and relentlessly scattering aitches through his extravagant facial hair.

That same why-make-it poser swirls even more conspicuously around his new one, A Haunting In Venice.

The multi-layered moustache is back, fully deserving a credit of its own, but I can’t imagine Christie fans loving all the liberties Branagh and screenwriter Michael Green take with the great Dame’s 1969 story Hallowe’en Party. Of these, the most whopping is the shift of setting from the genteel (if somewhat accident-prone) fictional English village of Woodleigh Common to a spooky Venetian palazzo.

Since it’s also hard to see the film appealing to those who aren’t fans of Christie, that pretty much accounts for the entire cinema-going demographic.

I suppose there might be a third set of punters who don’t much care one way or the other about Christie but relish a good supernatural mystery full of jump scares. Yet Branagh tries so hard with those scares — doors banging, chandeliers plummeting, parrots screeching, ghosts looming — that they swiftly become about as chilling as your average caffe latte.

As it happens, I saw A Haunting In Venice with my pal Tony, and afterwards we went for dinner in a Chinese restaurant where we were busily discussing the film’s frailties when the waiter seemed to materialise from nowhere and asked in a loud, rasping voice whether we were ready to order. For the first time all evening, we both jumped out of our skins.

Still, in fairness to Branagh, Venice isn’t a bad backdrop for a creepy story and his film carries some distinct echoes of Nic Roeg’s 1973 classic Don’t Look Now. His mistake, metaphorically, is to over-egg the zabaglione.

Most of the action takes place in the creepy palazzo, said to house an ancient curse called ‘the children’s vendetta’. But it’s not as though, to swerve the children’s vendetta, you can just leg it next door. According to Poirot’s lugubrious Italian bodyguard, every dwelling in Venice is said to be either ‘haunted or cursed’. Heck, not even Woodleigh Common is that unlucky.

The wily old super-sleuth needs a bodyguard because, although as the film begins he has retired, he is still comically besieged by folk wanting him to solve their mysteries. It is 1947 and Venice, charmingly known as La Serenissima, has her most romantic face on, with not an overpriced glass trinket or overweight American cruise-shipper to be seen.

Poirot has no intention of getting back to work until his American crime-novelist friend Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey) turns up to tell him that Venice isn’t the only ‘gorgeous relic slowly sinking into the sea’. His brilliant mind, she says cattily, is in danger of doing the same.

She wants him to debunk a psychic, Joyce Reynolds (Michelle Yeoh), who has been engaged by a grieving mother, Rowena Drake (Kelly Reilly), to contact her dead daughter, Alicia. But as you might have guessed, that’s not the half of it. Did Alicia kill herself or was she bumped off?

There’s a housekeeper, Olga (Camille Cottin), who seems to know more than she’s letting on, while the family doctor, Dr Ferrier (Jamie Dornan), is a suspiciously unstable fellow evidently capable of anything. Dealing with post-traumatic issues after helping to liberate Belsen at the end of the war, he is a constant worry to his precocious son Leopold (Jude Hill, who also played Dornan’s son in Branagh’s delightful 2021 autobiographical film Belfast).

Poirot duly attends Mrs Reynolds’ seance, at which someone is murdered. Then someone else comes a cropper. And a sinister masked figure tries to drown our hirsute hero in an apple-bobbing bucket. Did I forget to say it’s Halloween, and by now, Branagh is really ramping up the melodrama.

There’s a storm raging outdoors and Poirot getting jolly stern indoors, declaring that until he finds out who the killer is, ‘no one shall leave zis place’. In truth, it’s a message at least as ominous for those of us in the cinema as for those in the cast.

Bolan’s Shoes, made for a fraction of the budget of A Haunting In Venice, feels twice as authentic. At first, as we are whisked back to 1976, to a group of lively kids from a Liverpool children’s home travelling by coach to a Marc Bolan gig, the film seems reminiscent of 2019’s Blinded By The Light, a frothy feelgood picture inspired by the music of Bruce Springsteen.

The titular inspiration here is Bolan, his band T-Rex and his spangly platform shoes, but actually they’re all pretty peripheral to the main narrative, which springs from the coach crashing disastrously on the way home (a year before Bolan himself lost his life in a motor accident).

With occasional flits back in time, most of the story unfolds in the present day, when Jimmy, the 20th-century boy once blamed for the coach crash, turns up in adulthood, sensitively played by Timothy Spall as both epileptic and bipolar.

Leanne Best is especially terrific as another of the crash survivors, Penny, who is now married to a gentle Anglesey vicar but whose reunion with Jimmy powers the rest of the film.

The writer and director, better known as an actor (he was Owen Armstrong in Coronation Street for five years), is Ian Puleston-Davies. Hats off to him for a film that is dark in many ways but, ultimately, if you’ll forgive my own oblique glam-rock reference, positively sweet.

The Nettle Dress (12A, 68 mins)

Rating:

Most of us know something about foraging for food in the wild, but not so much about foraging for clothes.

Dylan Howitt’s engaging documentary The Nettle Dress follows a gentle English eccentric called Allan Brown who, after collecting the raw materials in the East Sussex countryside, sets out to make a dress, as the title implies, from nettles.

This extraordinary, intensive process takes seven years, during which time Brown’s wife Alex is diagnosed with terminal cancer aged only 45, and dies.

So his mission, supported by his numerous children, becomes an extremely moving labour of love and loss.

He is struck by the contrast between the plant’s belligerent reputation as a source of nasty stings (more than justified in my experience) and the ‘soft, silky’ fibres that can be spun from it; indeed he likens the ‘sensual’ weaving process to ‘combing the hair of your lover’.

The final product is a kind of Viking-era dress, cheerfully modelled by one of his daughters, that might suit an extra on Game Of Thrones.

I’m not sure that ‘hedgerow couture’ will catch on, but this lyrical film offers a beguiling introduction.

Classic film on TV

The Band Wagon (1953) 

Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse dance up an absolute storm in Vincente Minnelli’s enduring charmer, one of the great MGM musicals.

BBC2, 2.40pm, tomorrow