A Haunting In Venice Plot Summary
In A Haunting in Venice, Hercule Poirot (Kenneth Branagh) is spending his days in Venice, Italy, now retired from the hustle and bustle of murder investigations and enjoying his time eating his favourite biscuits on his luxury rooftop.
His bodyguard bats away the constant requests for his services, until one day his peace is disrupted by a crime writer from his past. Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey) wants Poirot’s assistance in proving that a psychic is a fake. It’s not his usual sort of case, but he agrees to come along for the ride. They attend a seance at opera star, Rowena Drake’s rotting palazzo, which ultimately ends in murder.
Who gets murdered?
The unfortunate victim who sets the investigation in motion in A Haunting in Venice is Mrs. Reynolds, played by Oscar-winning actress Michelle Yeoh. She is the psychic who is conducting the seance at the run-down palazzo. Poirot has figured out Mrs. Reynolds is a fraud by noticing the use of two assistants to fake contact with the dead. After this discovery, Mrs. Reynolds is thrown from a balcony and impaled by a statue.
This isn’t the end of the mysterious deaths, as Dr. Leslie Ferrier is next up on the deceased list. Opera diva Rowena forces him to stab himself to make it look like a murder in order to save his son. She manages to do this while Ferrier is locked inside a soundproof room. Her plan was to frame Poirot for the murder, as he was the only one to hold a key to the room.
How does Poirot solve the case?
Poirot is able to put all the pieces together following an attempt on his life and some weird ghostly sightings. He does what he does best and gathers the potential killers inside the estate after Mrs. Reynold’s murder and the strange death of Dr. Ferrier.
His first discovery is that his trusted bodyguard had been paid off by Ariadne to coax him out of retirement to attend the seance at the palazzo. He doesn’t believe that she is the killer, he just deduces that she wants a new angle on a crime book.
Poirot reveals that he thinks Rowena is the killer, believing that she poisoned her own daughter with honey from a toxic flower, leading to her having weird hallucinations. This realisation comes after Poirot himself is poisoned and experiences similar hallucinations after drinking some tea.
It turns out Rowena was being blackmailed by someone with too much information on her past activities, and she believed it to be Mrs. Reynolds. She killed Mrs. Reynolds, but upon realizing she was wrong, she went after Dr. Ferrier instead.
How does A Haunting In Venice end?
After Rowena’s crimes are exposed, she attempts to escape, and Poirot chases her to a bedroom, where she falls from the balcony and dies. The following morning, all the remaining survivors emerge from the palazzo and go their separate ways. The movie ends with Poirot on his luxury balcony, meeting with a guest to discuss a murder investigation. He is well and truly back in the game.
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