Death on the Nile (2022)
(Kenneth Branagh as Hercule Poirot in Death on the Nile)
Death on the Nile (2022)
Kenneth Branagh directed the 2017 Murder on the Orient Express, where he also starred as Agatha Christie’s famous sleuth Hercule Poirot. He and the screenwriter, Michael Green, maintained the basic structure of Christie’s novel. Except for the casting of actors of color — a welcome change, gracefully handled — Dame Agatha would have understood what the two were up to.
I’m not quite sure what she’d make of their latest collaboration, Death on the Nile. More on that in a minute. The novel’s plot is pared down, with some characters eliminated, but the script roughly comports with the action Christie laid out. Set in the 1930s, it centers on a rich, beautiful socialite, Linnet Ridgeway (Gal Gadot), who can have pretty much any man she chooses. Linnet’s dear friend Jacqueline de Bellefort (Emma Mackey, in a fine, fiery performance), is madly in love with Simon Doyle (Armie Hammer), a handsome, penniless playboy. Jacqueline persuades Linnet to hire Simon as her groundskeeper but doesn’t bargain on the two falling in love. Jacqueline, betrayed, vows to win Simon back. Undaunted, Linnet and Simon hotly pursue their affair and marry. Polite British society is scandalized.
Defiantly, the couple plan a lavish Egyptian honeymoon sailing up the Nile on the deluxe S.S. Karnak, an enormous, double-deck steamer/paddle boat.
Among those on board is Linnet’s close longtime confidante, Bouc (Tom Bateman), and his snobbish mother Euphemia (Annette Bening), who wants her son to marry well. Bouc also happens to be an old friend of Poirot’s. He easily wangles an invitation for the famous detective to join the friends and hangers-on who’ve been invited to share the river adventure. Poirot, on vacation, readily agrees, imagining the whole thing will be something of a lark that will allow him to indulge his favorite pastime, studying human emotion in all its shifting colors.
It will turn out to be a more harrowing exercise than he can foresee. Shortly after he comes on board, Linnet confides in the detective that she’s afraid of literally everyone on the ship. Having money, she tells Poirot, means there’s no one she can trust.
She’s more correct than she realizes. Who would want Linnet dead? Highest on the list is Jacqueline, who, still in love with Simon, follows the couple wherever they go, even making her way on board the Karnak. Simon tells everyone that Jacqueline is unhinged, he never loved her, and she could pose a real danger to his beloved Linnet. Poirot agrees but counsels the couple that until Jacqueline commits a crime, there’s nothing they can do to stop her pursuing them.
When the ship berths for the guests to go ashore and explore giant ancient statues of Ramses and other Egyptian monarchs, a huge boulder falls from above, missing Linnet by inches. There’s now no doubt about it. Her life is in danger.
All this follows an expected mystery template. To keep us transfixed, Branagh and his longtime cinematographer, Haris Zambarloukos, have whipped up an exquisite visual backdrop. Egypt looks majestic and mystical, a site of massive historical significance with a torpid, entangling beauty. The Nile at various times of day looks both inviting and forbidding. I saw the movie in 70 mm IMAX, and I highly recommend watching it in that format. Branagh and Zambarloukos have fashioned scenes to be not just pictorially sumptuous but enticing and disturbing at the same time.
The script has also added distinct overtones that Christie would have been incapable of incorporating into her rather conventional mystery, even given its exotic setting.
In this re-telling, Poirot has reached a stage in his distinguished career when he’s free to brood over and re-assess his past. For him, his legendary skill at exposing ghastly crimes has lost some of its allure. At the movie’s opening, we see the young Poirot in 1914 as part of the Belgian army on the WWI front. In the course of a devastating shelling attack on his brigade, he’s wounded, suffering severe facial scarring, which we learn still lies beneath his elaborately tended moustache.
But even back then, the damage has been more than physical. Poirot’s soul has been wounded, too, and decades later we meet him in, of all places, a smoky jazz nightclub, featuring a Black blues singer, Salome Outterbourne (Sophie Okonedo).
This adds an element to the story, and takes Poirot in a direction, that Christie couldn’t possibly have imagined. This is the least cerebral Poirot caught on film so far. Finney, Ustinov and Suchet never became this Nietzschean, this appalled by the abiding scourge of human evil.
It turns out that Salome’s manager is her niece Rosalie (Letitia Wright), who was a schoolmate of Linnet’s, and the two have remained in touch. The Linett-Rosalie-Salome connection permits Green to delve deeply into Poirot’s mid-life — or is it late career? — crisis. Poirot is enchanted by Salome’s powerful singing in the nightclub, and he’s both pleased and jolted when she’s invited to provide the entertainment on board the Karnak.
(Even Poirot’s elegant moustache hides a secret in Death on the Nile)
When Rosalie falls under suspicion and her loyalty to Linnet is questioned, both Salome and Poirot are dismayed, and a link between them is forged. The movie’s ending hints that Branagh and Green might attempt future tales of Poirot and this unlikely mutual fascination between two people from different social universes.
Green has altered a few backstories, mostly to darken the tone. Okonedo’s world-weary blues singer seems unsurprised by any twist of evil. Russell Brand plays Linnet’s embittered former fiancé — she ditched him to marry Simon — a disillusioned doctor now even more soured on “advanced” cultures.
And the Absolutely Fabulous creators, Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French, play, respectively, Linnet’s left-leaning godmother and her nurse companion.
Linnet’s shady lawyer Andrew (Ali Fazal) seems bent on inveigling her into signing documents that may or may not be to her advantage but, if she died, could help line his pockets.
Bening’s cranky dowager disapproves of her son Bouc’s romance with Rosalie and grows increasingly hostile toward Linnet’s influence on both.
Okonedo is compelling onstage (lip-synching songs performed by Sister Rosetta Tharpe) and off. Her jaded eyes look on moral squalor without blinking.
Not to forget Jacqueline, who is dogging Simon and Linnet’s every step. In spite of it all, Jacqueline insists that Simon still loves her.
But we’re not really there to solve the case. It’s more as though the blues and the clues form a mix we’re meant to sort out. The clues are scattered and don’t easily add up. The mystery is largely undetectable until the big reveal at the end. What’s watchable is people behaving badly, and Poirot, with increasing sadness and rage, deplores human nature on display. The story’s deepest mystery is how much longer Poirot can put up with the galling human race.
Branagh plays these musings on humanity’s inescapable vileness with startling urgency, passion and bile. It’s not just killers his Poirot reviles, it’s the twisted mankind that keeps sprouting them. Or is it simply nature? For what look like thematic reasons, both Branagh the director and Green the screenwriter let us see, first, a viper that suddenly springs from a snake charmer’s basket and strikes. Then, beneath the ocean we see a giant creature suddenly devour a much smaller one. And in a peaceful setting a crocodile emerges from the water, snatches a beautiful bird between its jaws, and descends back into the ocean, chomping at its prey.
In such an unpredictable universe, we can guess at the identity of a killer only fitfully. Primarily we’re there to witness humanity succumbing to basic instincts. Killing is indeed the worst people do. But simply being themselves, they can give even a mastermind like Poirot the blues.
Yet in the end you feel most of the characters have survived a moral, not just a physical, ordeal. Their sense of order has been threatened, which is what we normally take as the hallmark of murder mysteries. People do dreadful things and may sometimes, without a Poirot on the scene, get away with them.
But perhaps it’s not the killer who’s the con artist. Maybe Branagh is asking us to stop letting ourselves be conned, to face human ghastliness, refuse to deny it. Solving murders isn’t the most perplexing human problem. Preventing them is.