For the third instalment of Oscar-winner Kenneth Branagh's stately and elegant Hercule Poirot franchise, Branagh and screenwriter Michael Green chose one of Christie's lesser-known Poirot books, 1969's Hallowe'en Party. However, lovers of Christie's works will notice that they have only taken the loosest inspiration from the book, the most immediate change being its relocation from a small English village in the 1960s to a foggy night in 1947 Venice.
Set ten years after Death on the Nile, Poirot has chosen to retire to Venice and hire a bodyguard (Riccardo Scamarcio) to stop the lines of people begging him to take their cases from getting out of hand. Old friend Ariadne Oliver, played by Tina Fey, gets around the bodyguard by inviting Poirot to a Halloween party for the city's orphans held by famous opera singer Rowena, played by Kelly Reilly. After the children leave, Poirot finds himself dragged into a seance to contact Rowena's mysteriously dead daughter, Alicia, who apparently killed herself by throwing herself off a balcony into the canal.
The rest of the cast includes Jamie Dornan as a doctor haunted by the war; his son Leopold, played by Jude Hill; a housekeeper played by Camille Cottin, the dead girl's ex-fiance, played by Kyle Allen; and Michelle Yeoh as the theatrical medium Mrs Reynolds. The remainder of Poirot's evening is characterised by claustrophobic conditions, more deaths (of course!), and seemingly inexplicable phenomena.
As always in Branagh's Poirot movies, the costumes, designed by Sammy Sheldon, are elegant and beautiful. As it is a chilly autumn in Venice, the cast is seen wearing weather-appropriate, less dandified clothes than in the previous films. Throughout the film, Poirot mostly wears a blue three-piece pinstripe suit with a subtly striped spearpoint collar shirt and a textured red foulard tie. His collar is brought together, and the tie's knot is raised with a beautiful collar bar. In other scenes, he dons a bellied front overcoat and a homburg hat.
Jamie Dornan's Dr Ferrier also wears some gorgeous tailoring. His exquisitely English single-breasted gun check jacket has broad shoulders and a drape cut. It is paired with brown tweed trousers and a spearpoint collar shirt featuring a fun yellow and brown multi-stripe pattern. There is triple pattern mixing with the gun check of the jacket, stripes of the shirt, and abstract tie design. Elsewhere, Dornan wears an olive green tank top in a wide knit and a short cut.
Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey) sports an exquisite 1940s-inspired emerald green skirt suit. The jacket has structured shoulders, a nipped-in waist, and a flared skirt with flap hip pockets. It's paired with a matching-coloured lighter-weight accordion-pleated knee-length skirt. She's also seen in a coordinating waistcoat with a patterned bishop-sleeved blouse, a loose-fitting plaid overcoat in various shades of green, and a forest green fedora with a brown hat band.
As the film is set over just one night, there is a small variety of costumes, but the designer did a fantastic job of making each character unique, and the details on the outfits add the right amount of period charm. Below, you can see a few more stills from the film displaying the cast's costumes.
The Takeaways
Did you like the costumes from A Haunting in Venice? Which character's style did you prefer?
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