Review: Technical and Directorial Deficiencies Mar ‘Death on the Nile’
“When you have money, no one is ever really your friend.”
After solving the murder on the Orient Express, world renowned super sleuth Hercule Poirot (Kenneth Branagh) heads to Egypt under dubious circumstances. Linnet Ridgeway (Gal Gadot), heiress to the Ridgeway fortune, and Simon Doyle (Armie Hammer), a hunky no-name without a penny to his name, just consecrated their marriage and are about to celebrate with an opulent honeymoon in Egypt with friends and confidants, if you can call them that. Among them is Jacqueline de Bellefort (Emma Mackey), a former flame of Simon’s who was once set to be engaged to him before he called it off to court Linnet and who follows the newly weds obsessively. Sensing an aura of misdeed in her jealously, the perceptive Poirot accompanies this group, only to find himself in the the midst of a snake pit of guests all circling Linnet for one reason or another. Tensions progressively mount and eventually a murder takes place. Lucky for them, they have the world’s greatest detective to solve the case.
In this entry of Agatha Christie’s Poirot series, love and greed motivate our suspects. Each one has had some chance encounter, monetary business deal, or romantic grievance that colors their relationship with the victim, and in proper whodunit fashion, each one is sufficiently probed for culpability. Unlike Murder on the Orient Express, where the grand reveal is a genre subversion that makes this guessing game satisfyingly mute, the culprits here are pretty easy to spot, especially after the film’s much belabored thesis — that love is undying and can drive people to kill — is telegraphed to the audience.
When the mystery is taken out this murder mystery film, a heavy burden falls on the technical and directorial elements. Branagh’s direction assigns an overbearing gravity to the material in an effort to heighten the drama; if the opening scene wasn’t enough to tip you off to this, Poirot’s self-righteous convictions to seek justice in the face his own traumatic grief will. Addressing a murder this way seems logical, but this seriousness is particularly curious given how unintentionally comical and camp the film’s can be, particularly in its sensual moments. A dance scene shared between Simon and Jacqueline in the first act sees them quite literally dry humping like animals in public while a sexual encounter between Linnet and Simon on the Temple of Abu Simbel proves that two conventionally attractive individuals can still be subject to awkwardness.
Beyond the narrative beats, much of the film is marred by visual deficiencies. Haris Zambarloukos’s cinematography is characterized by a flashy camera that needlessly circles interrogations and highlights the film’s bland digital rendition of Egypt. Garish lighting reenforces the film’s omnipresent artifice and lays bare the reality that Death on the Nile was shot on sound stages in England rather than on location, which, for a film where its exotic locale is so central, seems to be a missed opportunity.
Watching this film, I could only imagine what could have been. Not only with improvements technically, but also regarding its overall tone. Would it be too much to ask for a murder-mystery of the week serial with eccentric characters and exotic locations instead of something that takes itself so seriously that it has to assign a gritty origin story to Poirot’s mustache (not joking here)? Assessing all these cinematic warts made me realize that the essence of the whodunit film was fittingly captured in Rian Johnson’s Knives Out, and what I want from a film like this is most likely coming this fall with Knives Out 2. All I have to do is wait.
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