Cast: Kenneth Branagh, Tom Bateman, Annette Bening, Russell Brand, Ali Fazal, Dawn French, Gal Gadot, Armie Hammer, Rose Leslie, Emma Mackey, Sophie Okonedo, Jennifer Saunders and Letitia Wright
Director: Kenneth Branagh
Rating: Three stars (out of 5)
Had the Covid-19 outbreak not scuttled movie production and distribution schedules the world over, Kenneth Branagh's follow-up to Murder on the Orient Express (2017) would have arrived in our midst nearly two years ago. While we waited for Death on the Nile to get past a series of release postponements, the director made the beautiful, black-and white, semi-autobiographical film Belfast, which has since snagged several Oscar nominations, including for Best Picture, Best Directing and Best Original Screenplay.
Two of the key technicians who worked with Branagh on Belfast, cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos and production designer Jim Clay, both regular collaborators of the director, were also part of the “Nile” crew. The duo, one visualising and orchestrating the physical spaces on the screen, the other capturing them on camera, make their inputs felt in the visually sumptuous and opulently mounted Death on the Nile, just as they did in Belfast.
Branagh, both the actor playing the Belgian super-sleuth Hercule Poirot and the director reimagining the murder mystery that Agatha Christie wrote more than eight decades ago, makes a significant departure from the dominant tone and spirit of “Orient Express” and places the master detective and the work he does in a markedly more pensive, lonesome zone in Death of the Nile. In a scene or two the detective even chokes and tears up.
The film is none the worse for this 'reinvention' of Poirot unless one sees it entirely from the perspective of those who might have taken a shine to the jaunty action-hero cloak that the protagonist donned in “Orient Express”. Branagh's “Nile” is the second big screen version of the story (the first, released in 1978, was led by Peter Ustinov).
Ustinov's Hercule Poirot was a jovial, wisecracking detective who relished the idea of always staying a step ahead of everyone around him. Branagh's is a more contemplative, quieter, even self-absorbed, man content to follow his instincts as he gets cracking on a new case and works his way around the people on board the Karnak sailing down the river Nile.
Death of the Nile takes its own sweet time to spring the murder upon us, lingering over the expository detailing packed into Michael Green's screenplay. Once the titular flashpoint is out of the way, the film gathers some momentum and shifts gears ever so slightly and sheds its slow and steady rhythm to embrace a decidedly faster, more urgent clip. The intrigue, if not the suspense, increases progressively as Poirot digs deeper into the leads that he finds as he ferrets for the truth.
Wealthy heiress Linnet Ridgeway-Doyle (Gal Gadot), who has invited her friends and family to join her in Egypt to celebrate her marriage to Simon Doyle (Arnie Hammer), has reason to worry about her personal safety. The guests on the wedding cruise down the Nile include Linnet's former friend Jacqueline de Bellefort (Emma Mackey), who turns up on the ship uninvited after having been betrayed by the heiress and dumped unceremoniously by her lover. Several of the others in the party have reason not to like either Linnet or Simon, or both – and each other.
Murder on the Orient Express, owing to the featured mode of transport, was a zippy affair and allowed Poirot to travel from one place in Europe to another in pursuit of a killer. In Death of the Nile,which has a deliberate pace and plays out almost entirely on a sailing ship, the private eye has the scope to retreat into himself, contemplate his past, and mull over the circumstances that might have led to the death that he is called upon to investigate. So, the first hour of Death on the Nile is expended on keeping the audience guessing over whose death is round the corner. We are introduced to the various characters on board and provided glimpses of the loves they have lost, the grudges they hold and they resentments they nurture. Once the murder happens, the focus of the guessing game obviously turns to the likely murderer and Poirot's investigations. The body count is higher than it usually is in an Agatha Christie story and many a red herring is thrown in our path.
The most obvious suspect to begin with is Jacqueline thanks the pistol she carries in her handbag. She is nursing the wounds of a recent betrayal. But Poirot has many others on his mind, notably Linnet's spurned suitor, medical doctor and aristocrat Linus Windlesham (Russell Brand), her cousin and estate manager Andrew Katchadourian (Ali Fazal) and the sleuth's friend Bouc (Tom Bateman, who was also in the first film).
As Poirot gathers clues and interrogates the suspects and his probe takes him closer to a conclusion, his wistful mood (whose source is explained in an opening black-and-white flashback to his World War 1 combat experience and a personal tragedy, an aspect that Christie never explored in the novels and short stories she devoted to the man's exploits) comes to bear upon the film and Branagh brings it out with all the force at his command.
The actors playing the suspects, on their part, are presented with an opportunity to delve into aspects of their roles that aren't apparent instantly or on the surface. Sophie Okonedo, playing American Blues singer Salome Otterbourne and Annette Bening, as a well-known painter and Bouc's mother, shine the brightest.
Ali Fazal, in the guise of a shifty man who keeps a great deal to himself, is splendid, too. The actor uses his eyes, smile and gait to articulate what lies beneath the surface. Comedienne Jennifer Saunders, cast against type, is wonderful as the bride's socialite-turned-socialist godmother, who, too. It turns out, might have a motive to commit murder.
Death on the Nile is exquisitely crafted and sparklingly packaged. The spectacle that it conjures up is bright and bewitching but its dazzle is neither blinding nor consistent. But despite its old-fashioned and predictable trajectory, the film does not lose its grip on the flow of the narrative nor its hold on the audience. It's a classically structured, well-acted and sturdily executed puzzle that is well worth a watch.
