After Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile, Kenneth Branagh takes on Agatha Christie’s 1969 novel Hallowe’en Party with A Haunting in Venice. The upcoming film features a star cast that includes Michelle Yeoh, Kelly Reilly, Jamie Fornan, Tina Fey, Kyle Allen and others. The story sees Branagh’s Hercule Poirot return to his sleuthing ways to expose a fraud seance. Before he knows it, he’s embroiled in a murder mystery with supernatural elements involved.
The film takes its liberties with the source text. For starters, it is set in Venice instead of the English countryside. Before filming, the team looked up early horror films like The Old Dark House and Black Narcissus to give the Venetian palazzo a “haunted house” look and feel. Production designer John Paul Kelly who was tasked with recreating Venice in a London studio explains, “We spent a lot of time working out how this world should evolve, and whether it should feel like a haunted house or an actual Venetian palazzo. We needed to get the balance right in telling the story.”
While filming took place at several iconic Venetian locations including gothic palazzos and stunning canals, it quickly became clear that the film’s sequences require the mobility of a set, “The story is full of tricks,” says Kelly. “It’s full of chandeliers dropping, doors swinging open, water pouring down walls, and it’s very, very specific in terms of who has to be where, and who’s in the library when somebody else is on the stairs, and so on.”
Jamie Dornan was floored by the set-up. Talking about the eerie spaces, he says, “You felt like you were in a real, enclosed building… It creates a sense of authenticity in the setting. Of course, there were lights and cameras and boom mics and all sorts of stuff, but anything that can help make the actors feel that they are actually trapped in this place where very strange things are happening, is so helpful. In fact, I’ve never been on a set like that before, and it was amazing to have it created for us because it made our job that much easier.”
Echoing the sentiment, Tina Fey explains, “The sets felt as if you’d gone into the most beautiful, expensive, perfect dark ride at Disneyland and had been allowed to get out of the car. The level of detail in them was incredible, and the fact that the sets were contiguous was so impressive. Most times when you make a movie you are in one set piece and then you go around the door and there’s nothing there, but with this set, you could really walk through the entire house. And it was very dark. I have never been on a set with more candlelight and open flames.”
A Haunting in Venice arrives in theatres on September 152.
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