There was a time when Kenneth Branagh’s Death on the Nile, his second adaptation of a classic Agatha Christie novel, was going to come out before his big personal Oscar-bait project Belfast. There was also a time it didn’t happen to star a possibly cannibalistic man credibly accused of multiple sexual assaults, an Apartheid defendant, a staunch anti-vaxxer, and a COVID conspiracy nut, but it’s stuff the movie must deal with now more than two years after it was filmed. Indeed the jokes about this movie being ‘cursed’ for these unfortunate cast issues in addition to all the delays have attained greater traction than the movie itself. To some degree though, controversy sells, and Branagh is perhaps hoping that is true for the second installment in a series he so desperately wants to continue.
A lot has happened though in the five years since Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express –which proved not to be as effective a resuscitator of the whodunit genre as Rian Johnson’s Knives Out, combining the classic tenets and tropes with a distinctly contemporary outlook. Branagh’s take is just to infuse the stories with more action, more blockbuster-friendly set-pieces, and it’s a bit hollow. Yet there is something charming in just how dedicated he is to reviving these stories -which are well worth keeping alive; and how much he loves playing Hercule Poirot.
That’s evident from the first scene, which has no connection to Death on the Nile or any source in Christie’s work that I know of, but is something more akin to a fanfiction origin story for Poirot. It’s a flashback to the First World War, where his genius deductive skills served his company well until he suffered a mutilation, and in a beat I can’t believe Branagh took seriously, it proves to be the bizarre explanation nobody asked for for Poirot’s funny moustache. As much as this detour has no bearing on the subsequent story apart from weakly establishing a romantic history with a nurse for Poirot to prop up his investment a touch, it does forecast adequately enough the tone of the piece.
Death on the Nile is much what the title would imply -a murder that is carried out on a lavish cruise down the Nile. It’s got much the same format as Orient Express, confining its’ cast of suspects to a single space removed from civilization, with a ticking clock as to these circumstances in the form of an arrival at their destination. So it’s no wonder Branagh chose this story as the safest bet to continue the series as opposed to something a bit more unconventional like The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. But like Orient Express, this one comes with multiple previous adaptations to compare to.
What this Death on the Nile has most plainly going in its’ favour is its’ look. It’s easy to forget that when he wants to be, Branagh can be a wonderfully visual director and here in contrast to that dim, coldness of Orient Express, there’s a much crisper liveliness reflective of the plots’ “exotic” setting. 1930s Egypt is rendered with exciting vibrancy, even where the environment is clearly digital. The colour scheme is rich, the lighting excellent -it’s a very elegant-looking movie, which suits well the subject matter and general class of its’ characters touring a picturesque world without care for its’ denizens. Branagh seems to lampshade this at one point where a number of implicitly impoverished locals are seen at the riverbanks that the patrician travelers look on -but then finds no time for commentary once the privileged affairs kick in.
It’s a two-fold mystery involving the murder of the aristocratic Linnet Ridgeway (Gal Gadot) and the disappearance of her priceless necklace. The prime suspect appears to be her old friend Jackie (Emma Mackey) who’d been engaged to Linnet’s husband Simon Doyle (Armie Hammer) before he ran off with her, and who has since been stalking the pair and behaving erratically. But of course it’s Agatha Christie, who is never so cut and dry -so there are other candidates and motives at play throughout the entourage invited along. It consists of a jilted doctor played by Russell Brand, a jazz singer played by Sophie Okonedo and her niece (Letitia Wright), a lawyer (Ali Fazal), a French maid (Rose Leslie), a socialite and her nurse played by a reunited French and Saunders, and Poirot’s assistant from Orient Express Bouc (Tom Bateman) along with his painter mother (Annette Benning). It’s a curious cast, though none truly stand out, with perhaps the exception of Mackey going really big in a way that actually kind of suits the plot. Otherwise it’s mostly a parade of bad affects. This cast features two American actors doing British accents and three British actors doing American accents with only Hammer and Okonedo being any good. Wright’s attempt at a Southern drawl is terribly inconsistent, Dawn French uses her actual accent while Jennifer Saunders tries to be a stuffy New Englander, despite the two coming from the same world, and Benning couldn’t be less British if she tried. And as so many of these characters have little substance to begin with, these arbitrary vocal choices in addition to a palpable tiredness in the performances of some such as Okonedo or Saunders, leaves the ensemble stale. It of course doesn’t help that the film is way less interested in any of these minor suspects than in Hammer and Gadot and even Bateman, who shockingly has a rather large role.
Clearly Branagh wants the film to be about something more than the basic plot and so he hones in on a theme of star-crossed romance, represented in both Simon and Linnet, and in Bouc’s desire to marry Wright’s Rosalie in defiance of his mothers’ wishes. Poirot himself of course has a tragic love story in his past that despite the visual prologue is only alluded to later on in how it ended -and now he seems to have feelings for Okonedo’s Salome. There is some theoretically interesting stuff here, in exploring the darker side of love, its’ authenticity, and how it effects people left behind like Jackie or Brand’s Windlesham. But it never rises above a curiosity and feels like Branagh trying to inject a kind of erotic tension into the proceedings without any actual eroticism. And this in conjunction with a focus on the most dramatic, violent beats of the story, including a couple more murders and Poirot actually partaking in a chase sequence that feels like it belongs in Hot Fuzz detracts from where the movie ought to be most concerned: the mystery. By the time Poirot gathers everyone together for the grand reveal scene we have no understanding how Poirot solved the mystery. And a murder mystery certainly doesn’t need to forecast its’ solution, but there should be ample opportunity to guess -we should see Poirot formulating, hypothesizing, considering clues, there should be some sense of how he came to his conclusion even if the audience hadn’t thought of it. Instead, Death on the Nile supposes the great detective just figured it all out off-screen, the intricacies and postulations never even suggested until the fateful climax.
But as I said, it’s a pretty movie, and Branagh’s having a great time as this character. Some of the other story strengths translate well -the Abu Simbel excursion is interesting and tense, even as it prolongs the actual murder; and the production work in general is pretty strong -stuff I’d like to see more of in the franchise industrial complex. However when the meat of the film is so lacklustre, the performances and central aims so misguided, there’s not much to be done. Death on the Nile remains a cursed film, likely Branagh’s last Poirot endeavour, and in spite of his passion, it can’t honestly be said that’s much of a loss.
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