The curious case of Kenneth Branagh returning as Hercule Poirot for a third time

Tom Hiddleston and Kenneth Branagh (Image source: Twitter/GitteLoeyche)

Sir Kenneth Charles Branagh has announced the third Hercule Poirot film that he will direct and star in as the Belgian detective. A Haunting In Venice will be based on the novel Hallowe'en Party. Branagh is possibly the most decorated British actor and filmmaker alive. The list of awards he has won is exhaustingly long, and he is also the only person ever to have been nominated for Oscars in seven different categories, from Best Actor to Best Animated Short Film.

In 2023, Kenneth Branagh returns as Hercule Poirot in “A Haunting in Venice.” The unsettling supernatural-thriller’ cast includes Kyle Allen, Camille Cottin, Jamie Dornan, Tina Fey, Jude Hill, Ali Khan, Emma Laird, Kelly Reilly, Riccardo Scamarcio, and Michelle Yeoh. pic.twitter.com/R6B7hoQQMx

— 20th Century Studios (@20thcentury) October 10, 2022

But his Poirot is a sacrilege.

He began his onslaught on the sleuth with the perfectly egg-shaped head in 2017 with Murder On The Orient Express, one of the most loved of Agatha Christie’s novels and a landmark in mystery fiction. Other assignments and the pandemic saved the world for a few years from another Branagh effort at Poirot, but it was too good to last. Death On The Nile was released early this year. And now Christie fans will have to await the next horror.

Neither of the two films is poor by itself—they are both well-directed films with stellar ensemble casts. But they are not, by any stretch of the imagination, anything close to how Christie imagined Poirot.

Gal Gadot and Ali Fazal in 'Death on the Nile', which released in India on February 11, 2022.

One, no one playing Poirot can take liberties with his moustache, his defining physical attribute that has been lovingly described many times by Christie. As far as we know, he spent more time waxing and twirling it to perfection than on solving murders. But Branagh as Poirot sports a furry monstrosity and also a half-goatee.

In Death On The Nile, we are even given a long backstory on Poirot’s moustaches, involving love and the First World War, which goes against the grain of anything that Christie wrote.

Two, Poirot, as written by Christie, is a short portly man. Branagh is neither short nor portly. He is a finely built 5 feet 10 inches. Are we quibbling here? No. Can Sherlock Holmes ever be credibly shown as anything but tall and slim?

Three, Christie’s Poirot is an absolutely non-athletic man and in fact abhors physicality of any sort. Branagh's Poirot runs, chases, climbs, even gets into fights—and wins. This is simply not right.

Four, Poirot is a decidedly asexual human being, and created deliberately so by Christie. Branagh's Poirot moons over a lost love, Katharine. This is unthinkable.

It is a universally accepted truth that film-makers have the right to interpret and change published stories and novels to match their own vision and cinematic needs. But there’s a line which most scriptwriters and directors do not cross. A classic character and canon demand some basic respect—and knowledge and understanding of what make them classic. Christie painstakingly detailed her detective’s appearance, attitudes, behavioural eccentricities and failings. Why would you want to tamper with that?

Christie is the highest-selling fiction writer of all time (not counting Shakespeare), having sold more than two billion copies of her books.

Obviously, Branagh was looking to bring a new vibe to Poirot, and it’s the millennial audience that everyone is aiming for, isn’t it? Most millennials may not have read Christie. Plus, people have been taking all sorts of liberties with even Shakespeare—didn’t Baz Luhrmann make an MTV version of Romeo And Juliet, set the story in Verona Beach, California, instead of Verona, Italy, and even changed the play’s name to Romeo + Juliet? True, but Luhrmann remained absolutely faithful to Shakespeare’s themes, only modernizing the landscape and the events. He even retained Shakespeare’s 16th century blank verse as dialogue.

A good example in the Poirot area is BBC’s Sherlock, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, inspired by the Holmes stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In the series, Sherlock lives in 21st century London, and his friend Dr Watson blogs about his exploits instead of writing hard-copy books. All the stories are original ones written by Steven Moffatt and Mark Gatiss. Traditional Holmes fans are a fastidious—even fanatical—lot. There are hundreds of Sherlock Holmes clubs around the world dedicated to celebrating him (The Holmesian societies in Japan alone have more than 80,000 members). But they were happy with what they saw and actively cheered the show. And for those who had not read a single Sherlock Holmes story, it was an intelligent and thrilling mystery series.

British actor Benedict Cumberbatch.

Moffatt and Gatiss studied all the stories that Doyle had written and all the trivia and research extremely deeply and built the series as both a homage to the stories and a giant game that dedicated Holmes fans could play, replete with in-jokes and references. By the time the first season of the show ended, hundreds of thousands of Holmes lovers were discussing the Easter eggs planted in Sherlock.

It started from the very titles of the episodes. A Study In Scarlet became A Study In Pink; The Empty House became The Empty Hearse; His Last Bow became His Last Vow. The mystery of the giant rat of Sumatra, which Doyle only mentioned but never elaborated on (“The world is not ready for it yet”), became the Sumatra Road station in the London Underground that was built but never used—a breathtakingly apt allegory. Some of the most famous lines that Doyle wrote for Holmes are retained, though now they are spoken in very different contexts. And the new Holmes, though born perhaps 150 years after Doyle’s, has the same quirks and idiosyncrasies. He still plays the violin and is a “high-functioning sociopath”.

Full disclosure: As a diehard Holmes fan, I don’t approve of the two films Guy Ritchie (a director whose films I generally love) made, starring Robert Downey Jr, and the TV series Elementary. Ritchie’s Holmes films are super-heavy on action, turning the detective into some sort of minor Marvel Comics hero, and in Elementary, set in New York, Dr Watson is a Chinese-American woman psychiatrist. However, as I said, I speak as a conservative Holmes fan. If I hadn’t been steeped in the stories, I would not have had a problem.

But that is precisely the point I wish to make. As any Spiderman lover would know, with great power comes great responsibility. When a director takes on a literary body of work that has been loved by millions of people across the world for a century or more (The Mysterious Affair at Styles, the first Poirot story, was published in 1920), he is dutybound to thoroughly know the books and understand why they have been loved so much. And then take the liberty of altering them for the screen.

There can be no better example of this than Peter Jackson, who filmed perhaps only 100 pages of the 1,000 pages of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord Of The Rings trilogy, yet managed to satisfy the most fervent book cult in the world and also please millions of other people who had never read the books. But then he got greedy and turned the 120-page prequel The Hobbit into another trilogy and the fans—and the larger audience—rejected it.

Since Branagh has got the funding for a third Poirot film, one can assume that the first two made money. Yet, the very fact that he has decided to set the film in Venice instead of the English village where Christie located her novel is troubling. Since his Poirot is a bit of a James Bond, one can even expect a CGI-heavy gondola or motorboat chase through the canals or some acrobatics in the basilica on the Piazza San Marco.

Branagh has every right to do what he wants to with Poirot, just as I have the right to be happy watching the ITV series starring David Suchet as the gold standard for Poirot—vain, short, portly, with a perfectly egg-shaped head and waxed moustache.