Editor’s Note: Noah Berlatsky (@nberlat) is a freelance writer in Chicago. The views expressed here are his own. View more opinion articles on CNN.
If you’re familiar with cozy detective fiction in general, and Agatha Christie in particular, it’s no spoiler to reveal that in the new Christie adaptation, director Kenneth Branagh’s “A Haunting in Venice,” Hercule Poirot, as usual, solves the case.
You also won’t be surprised to learn that he does it only after a lot of people have died. As in “Death on the Nile” (2022), Branagh’s last Christie exercise, Poirot’s victory speech is given with him almost literally standing on top of a pile of corpses. Though in this one, Poirot (Branagh) seems even less concerned by the death toll as he brags about his ratiocination while the luxuriant cinematography caresses the Venetian canals.
Cozies are usually thought of as a cute or comfortable genre — after all, you’ve got “cozy” right in the name. Series like “Murder, She Wrote” or “Death in Paradise” are reliably, reassuringly formulaic, with the death clocking in near the opening theme, and the solution slotted in right at the end. Christie classics like “Murder on the Orient Express” set violence amidst opulence, with Poirot interviewing each colorful character and jotting down their characteristics in a trusty notebook. Even the surprises feel calibrated not to startle too much.
“A Haunting in Venice” shows once again, though, that turning murder into a parlor game is often less harmless fun and more blank bloodthirstiness. Branagh’s Poirot, who even measures his eggs at breakfast, sees his job as taking the mess and uncertainty of life and death and organizing it into neat, clean solutions. But focusing on tidiness in the face of suffering requires a stifling of empathy, and an indifference to a lot of carnage.
Horror is often the genre pilloried as a sadistic danger to the psyches of the public, along with true crime. Cozies, though, with quiet efficiency, twirl their moustaches more cruelly than all those slashers, where death at least provokes a scream rather than a raised eyebrow.
“A Haunting in Venice” deliberately calls for the cozy/horror comparison, since, as the title suggests, it flirts with the supernatural. At the beginning of the film, Poirot has retired in Venice. But his old friend, the mystery novelist Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey) convinces him to help her try to debunk a medium, Joyce Reynolds (Michelle Yeoh), at a Halloween seance.
Reynolds has been hired by opera diva Rowena Drake (Kelly Reilly) to try to make contact with her daughter. Said daughter fell into the canal after a long illness caused, perhaps, by a broken heart. Rowena lives in a house where many children are supposed to have perished in a plague, and the intimation is that those children took her daughter with them into the afterlife.
Branagh’s Poirot films have made some efforts to humanize the detective. “Death on the Nile” gave him a tragic backstory and even a romantic interest. “Haunting,” though, makes the detective less of a machine by using, not romance, but horror.
As inexplicable phenomena pile up — disembodied voices of children singing, water pipes that won’t work, a banging in the basement — Poirot’s usual icy calm chips away. He shudders; he trembles. He looks discombobulated when Yeoh’s Joyce starts chewing up the sumptuous scenery during her screaming possession scene. “You’re jumpy,” the precocious, Edgar-Allan-Poe-reading child Leopold Ferrier (Jude Hill) tells Poirot with a chilly matter-of-factness that echoes that of the great detective himself.
Poirot, of course, isn’t jumpy for long. Horror, and its intimations of human fear, weakness and empathy for the departed spirits, is soon shuttled aside by the cozy’s usual clockwork mechanisms. There are plot twists, locked-room puzzles and hidden motivations everywhere. Poirot stalks through the opulent halls remorselessly, an all-seeing, hard-eyed avatar of justice, pulling revelations from foe and friend alike.
Poirot’s justice, though, does little to avert the rising body count. As Ariadne tells him with a good dollop of cruelty herself, he brings death with him wherever he goes. It’s almost as if a plentiful supply of corpses is necessary to stimulate his “little grey cells.” Cozies treat deaths as clues — and the more clues you have, the better.
In the novel “Halloween Party” (1969), on which “A Haunting in Venice” is (very, very loosely) based, the murderer is a gardener obsessed with getting money to fashion the perfect landscape. “I doubt if he even thought of his motive as sordid,” Poirot muses in the novel. “He thought of it only as necessary for the creation of more beauty. He’d gone mad on creation.”
That’s a good meta-description of how cozies work too. The arrangement of the plot is everything — a domino run of dead bodies elegantly falling one by one by one.
In horror, you’re supposed to feel the fear of each victim; you put yourself in their place. But Poirot does not feel with the victim. He — and you with him — watch from off to the side, musing at the pattern of death, not the emotions they arouse.
In Christie’s “Halloween Party,” multiple children are killed, and the novel doesn’t ask the reader to grieve. One young boy flatly characterizes his dead sister as “an awfully stupid sort of girl.” You’re supposed to put all the facts in order to figure out whodunnit. Catharsis, and even sympathy, are extraneous.
This isn’t to say that fans of cozies (like me!) are unfeeling monsters — any more than fans of horror (like me!) are sadists who revel in murder. Fantasy isn’t reality, and people aren’t doomed to replicate the genres they enjoy.
But our fantasies do tell us something about how our minds and hearts work. Cozies are satisfying and comforting because puzzles are solved and evil-doers are punished. Poirot in “Haunting” says he wished he believed in a spirit world because then he would believe in God. But of course in Christie’s novels Poirot functions as a kind of God himself. He sees all and then dispenses all-knowing justice. Poirot promises a satisfying order and method.
That comforting vision of an ordered universe, it turns out, though, is inseparable from a hollowing out of care. When your focus is on fitting everything in its place, there’s not a lot of space to pause for sorrow, or to ask if the best response to death and suffering is to try to make it fit. The peace of the cozy is a policeman’s peace. “A Haunting in Venice” imagines a world in which even ghosts bow before the law. The appeal is understandable, but it’s not exactly cozy.
