Disney’s The Haunted Mansion would probably have been more sophisticated, but I wound up instead at Kenneth Branagh’s latest Agatha Christie adaptation, A Haunting in Venice. There are so few film openings of any interest lately that I decided morbid curiosity was motivation enough.

I saw Branagh’s stupid adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express back in 2017, when he first took on directing as well as starring in Christie’s Hercule Poirot mysteries. Branagh is so hopelessly miscast as the brilliant black-haired Belgian detective Poirot, being sandy-haired and blue-eyed, with a face like an Irish potato and an acting style of hammy obviousness — hell, even his version of Poirot’s famous moustache is all wrong — that there’s a certain entertainment to be had in irritable hate-watching. (To see Poirot interpreted correctly, as every Christie mystery fan knows, just watch David Suchet play him for nearly a quarter of a century on ITV’s Agatha Christie’s Poirot series from 1989 to 2013. Rare perfection in casting and performance.)

Then I skipped Branagh’s Death on the Nile (2022) when reports indicated that it was even worse than his first outing. But I’m confident that A Haunting in Venice tops all of Branagh’s efforts when it comes to sheer filmmaking idiocy. It’s rare to see camerawork and lighting so atrocious they make you laugh out loud, but here we have it: a relentless visual assault of fish-eye lens work; shaky-cam running shots; 360-degree pans; who-put-out-the-lights-style darkness with leprous green and blue tints to suggest ghostliness; and extreme high-angle long shots intercut with extreme low-angle long shots as if a bat in the rafters and a beetle by the floorboards were having some sort of strangers-in-the-night exchange of glances (and by the way, that film might be worth watching, if only this mess of a film starred a bat and a beetle).