Nile, though your heart is breaking
The new adaptation of Agatha Christie's 1937 novel Death on the Nile written by Michael Green and directed by Kenneth Branagh is an almost perfect lateral move, quality-wise from the 2017 adaptation of Christie's 1934 novel Murder on the Orient Express, also written by Green and directed by Branagh. In a sense, this already speaks favorably of the team's work on Death on the Nile: Murder on the Orient Express has a much better mystery narrative as its spine, so it should turn out to be the better film by default.
Inasmuch as this had not turned out to be the case, I think it's largely because Branagh has a much surer idea of what he wants to be doing this time around. My problem with the 2017 film, as much as anything, was that it was a tonal mush, mixing "ho-ho, the Belgian fella does have a big fancy mustache!" jokes and "ho-ho, the Belgian fella does have an outrageous accent!" jokes, and a late-breaking fixation on the base nature of humans and our bottomless capacity to cause suffering in others of our kind, mixed with a piercing, self-loathing sense of regret from the jolly protagonist, none of which has any jokes at all. Death on the Nile just has one tone, really: it is the heavy, deeply serious tone, which if I am being honest isn't what I'd have run with. But at least it's just one thing.
That heavy tone gets established fast, in a prologue set during the Great War (I have not read the book, but I gather this is wholly original to the movie, and the most drastic shift to the source material). Here, a CGI de-aged Branagh appears as a younger, non-mustachioed Hercule Poirot, who saves his regiment and scores a major victory thanks to his uncannily precise powers of observation, but this comes at the cost of his beloved captain (Orlando Seale), along with terrible facial scarring to Poirot himself. Fear not, says his pretty nurse girlfriend Katherine (Susannah Fielding), soon to die in the hideous abattoir of trench warfare, you can just grow a bushy mustache to cover it. And despite the scars covering something like a full third of CG Branagh's face, this turns out to be correct. Which is all to say that yes, we in fact get an origin story for Poirot's mustache, and if I thought that Branagh was even a little bit capable of deliberate camp, I might have to assume that he was going for that here. But this man has always been a gruesomely self-serious filmmaker, so no, I just have to go with "this is super dumb". It's heavy, gloomy, war-is-hell story about Poirot's mustache, all shot in suffocatingly sleek high-contrast black-and-white by Haris Zambarloukos, in the one place where the decision to shoot on 65mm mostly works to the film's advantage. I also have to wonder if Branagh saw the results here and was so impressed that he decided to make Belfast in the same style, since they mostly look identical (Death on the Nile was originally meant for a fall 2019 release, before reshoots followed by two years of lockdowns, theater closures, accusations that one of the leads wanted to cannibalise his sexual partners, and soft box office delayed it to the dead of winter, 2022; Belfast was produced and released entirely in the period since this was in the can).
In addition to setting up the mustache, the prologue sets up a motif of being tragically unable to be with the person you love, which is going to be the main thematic spine of the rest of the movie, another reason this ends up feeling more focused than Orient Express, which pretty much just leaned into the "every five minutes is a new short film starring a new celebrity" thing. Indeed, Branagh and Green care so much about the characters and their love lives that they lay out all the interpersonal dynamics over the course of about half of the 127-minute film;'s running time before they finally kill somebody in their murder mystery. This happens aboard the Karnak, a steamer traveling the Nile river in 1937, right before the Second World War and the end of European colonialism made this kind of extravagant rich people tourism possible. The extravagant rich person of note this time around is Linnet Ridgeway (Gal Gadot), the daughter of a man whose fortune was at least partially made illegally; she's just married Simon Doyle (Armie Hammer), who was previously the fiancé of her best friend Jackie de Bellefort (Emma Mackey), and as a result, Jackie has been stalking the happy newlyweds, making a real pest of herself. This is why Linnet reluctantly agrees to go on an isolated river cruise (she'd prefer to just go straight to her monstrous, highly secure estate back in England), taking all of the friends and family she's gathered to have a party onboard. These include: Linnet's Communist godmother, Marie Van Schuyler (Jennifer Saunders); Mrs. Van Schuyler's nurse Mrs. Bowers (Dawn French), Linnet's friend and former fiancé Dr. Windlesham (Russell Brand); Linnet's school chum Rosalie Otterbourne (Letitia Wright); Rosalie's blues singer aunt and guardian Salome Otterbourne (Sophie Okonedo); Linnet's lawyer and (euphemistic?) cousin, Andrew Katchadourian (Ali Fazal); Linnet's maid Louise (Rose Bourget); and Louise's family friends, the eccentric rich painter Euphemia (Annette Bening) and her son Bouc (Tom Bateman), the latter of whom ropes his good buddy Poirot into joining. You know, just in case one of the people with a motive to kill Linnet - and wouldn't you just guess, it turns out every single member of the cast has such a motive, other than Poirot himself - ends up doing so while they're out there on the Nile.
Ever since the 1974 Murder on the Orient Express, part of the fun of big-budget, big-screen Christie adaptations - which is basically just the two Orient Expresses and a 1978 version of Death on the Nile itself, but the rhetorical flourish holds - has been seeing what kind of all-star cast is assembled, and on this count, at least, Death '22 is a big disappointment. Lord knows I jumped up and down a little when I learned that the film was going to include a French and Saunders reunion, but the stuff of indulgent movie star screen presence it's not. Gadot is the closest this has to a current A-lister, and she's kind of the quintessence of a movie star whose fame is due 100% to the comic book character she plays sometimes, and who has no apparent fanbase outside of that character. Bening is far and away the most iconic figure in the cast, but it hurts the film's case that Bening is also slightly terrible (she's fighting her way through a shabby English accent; meanwhile, Saunders is fighting her way through a shabby American accent. It's all very surreal). To be fair, everyone else is also slightly terrible, except for the folks like Hammer and Gadot, who are extremely terrible (they have the second- and third-largest roles, unfortunately). Okonedo emerges unscathed; she's alone in the cast in going right back to 1937 for the period style she uses to play the role, making Salome a larger-than-life performative figure given a larger-than-life mannered performance to match, and it's extremely wonderful. But Okonedo doesn't get much screen time.
That being said, at least one very crucial performance is an improvement over Murder on the Orient Express: Branagh is much less... just much less than he was before, or at least than my memories of his performance. His Poirot is a haunted, melancholy figure, who in witnessing all the love and thwarted love happening on the boat is trapped by his ghostly memories, and while this feels very much not at all to the point of Christie, at least it provides the film with a clear, anchor.
Beyond that, the film is mostly more of the same handsome period trappings, executed with some razzle-dazzle in the camerawork that really doesn't serve a purpose, but at least it appears to be costly. Much of the crew has returned from the 2017 film, including Zambarloukos, production designer Jim Clay, and the art direction team; editor Úna Ní Dhonghaíle and costume designer Paco Delgado are new. Either way, it's the same vibe: sets that have been fussed over with great care, filled with lots of walls of glass for Branagh to do internal framing; handsome but unmemorable costumes; stately production that happily doesn't dawdle too much in marching through the story at a crisp speed. It's all very "BBC on an enormous budget", which is pretty much the only thing Branagh ever does. The bones are Christie's bones, whatever adjustments have been made, so it's hard to feel ill-used by the story; it's not a very ingenious or insightful staging of that story, and not terribly fun either, but it's perfectly competent in a perfectly mediocre way.
Inasmuch as this had not turned out to be the case, I think it's largely because Branagh has a much surer idea of what he wants to be doing this time around. My problem with the 2017 film, as much as anything, was that it was a tonal mush, mixing "ho-ho, the Belgian fella does have a big fancy mustache!" jokes and "ho-ho, the Belgian fella does have an outrageous accent!" jokes, and a late-breaking fixation on the base nature of humans and our bottomless capacity to cause suffering in others of our kind, mixed with a piercing, self-loathing sense of regret from the jolly protagonist, none of which has any jokes at all. Death on the Nile just has one tone, really: it is the heavy, deeply serious tone, which if I am being honest isn't what I'd have run with. But at least it's just one thing.
That heavy tone gets established fast, in a prologue set during the Great War (I have not read the book, but I gather this is wholly original to the movie, and the most drastic shift to the source material). Here, a CGI de-aged Branagh appears as a younger, non-mustachioed Hercule Poirot, who saves his regiment and scores a major victory thanks to his uncannily precise powers of observation, but this comes at the cost of his beloved captain (Orlando Seale), along with terrible facial scarring to Poirot himself. Fear not, says his pretty nurse girlfriend Katherine (Susannah Fielding), soon to die in the hideous abattoir of trench warfare, you can just grow a bushy mustache to cover it. And despite the scars covering something like a full third of CG Branagh's face, this turns out to be correct. Which is all to say that yes, we in fact get an origin story for Poirot's mustache, and if I thought that Branagh was even a little bit capable of deliberate camp, I might have to assume that he was going for that here. But this man has always been a gruesomely self-serious filmmaker, so no, I just have to go with "this is super dumb". It's heavy, gloomy, war-is-hell story about Poirot's mustache, all shot in suffocatingly sleek high-contrast black-and-white by Haris Zambarloukos, in the one place where the decision to shoot on 65mm mostly works to the film's advantage. I also have to wonder if Branagh saw the results here and was so impressed that he decided to make Belfast in the same style, since they mostly look identical (Death on the Nile was originally meant for a fall 2019 release, before reshoots followed by two years of lockdowns, theater closures, accusations that one of the leads wanted to cannibalise his sexual partners, and soft box office delayed it to the dead of winter, 2022; Belfast was produced and released entirely in the period since this was in the can).
In addition to setting up the mustache, the prologue sets up a motif of being tragically unable to be with the person you love, which is going to be the main thematic spine of the rest of the movie, another reason this ends up feeling more focused than Orient Express, which pretty much just leaned into the "every five minutes is a new short film starring a new celebrity" thing. Indeed, Branagh and Green care so much about the characters and their love lives that they lay out all the interpersonal dynamics over the course of about half of the 127-minute film;'s running time before they finally kill somebody in their murder mystery. This happens aboard the Karnak, a steamer traveling the Nile river in 1937, right before the Second World War and the end of European colonialism made this kind of extravagant rich people tourism possible. The extravagant rich person of note this time around is Linnet Ridgeway (Gal Gadot), the daughter of a man whose fortune was at least partially made illegally; she's just married Simon Doyle (Armie Hammer), who was previously the fiancé of her best friend Jackie de Bellefort (Emma Mackey), and as a result, Jackie has been stalking the happy newlyweds, making a real pest of herself. This is why Linnet reluctantly agrees to go on an isolated river cruise (she'd prefer to just go straight to her monstrous, highly secure estate back in England), taking all of the friends and family she's gathered to have a party onboard. These include: Linnet's Communist godmother, Marie Van Schuyler (Jennifer Saunders); Mrs. Van Schuyler's nurse Mrs. Bowers (Dawn French), Linnet's friend and former fiancé Dr. Windlesham (Russell Brand); Linnet's school chum Rosalie Otterbourne (Letitia Wright); Rosalie's blues singer aunt and guardian Salome Otterbourne (Sophie Okonedo); Linnet's lawyer and (euphemistic?) cousin, Andrew Katchadourian (Ali Fazal); Linnet's maid Louise (Rose Bourget); and Louise's family friends, the eccentric rich painter Euphemia (Annette Bening) and her son Bouc (Tom Bateman), the latter of whom ropes his good buddy Poirot into joining. You know, just in case one of the people with a motive to kill Linnet - and wouldn't you just guess, it turns out every single member of the cast has such a motive, other than Poirot himself - ends up doing so while they're out there on the Nile.
Ever since the 1974 Murder on the Orient Express, part of the fun of big-budget, big-screen Christie adaptations - which is basically just the two Orient Expresses and a 1978 version of Death on the Nile itself, but the rhetorical flourish holds - has been seeing what kind of all-star cast is assembled, and on this count, at least, Death '22 is a big disappointment. Lord knows I jumped up and down a little when I learned that the film was going to include a French and Saunders reunion, but the stuff of indulgent movie star screen presence it's not. Gadot is the closest this has to a current A-lister, and she's kind of the quintessence of a movie star whose fame is due 100% to the comic book character she plays sometimes, and who has no apparent fanbase outside of that character. Bening is far and away the most iconic figure in the cast, but it hurts the film's case that Bening is also slightly terrible (she's fighting her way through a shabby English accent; meanwhile, Saunders is fighting her way through a shabby American accent. It's all very surreal). To be fair, everyone else is also slightly terrible, except for the folks like Hammer and Gadot, who are extremely terrible (they have the second- and third-largest roles, unfortunately). Okonedo emerges unscathed; she's alone in the cast in going right back to 1937 for the period style she uses to play the role, making Salome a larger-than-life performative figure given a larger-than-life mannered performance to match, and it's extremely wonderful. But Okonedo doesn't get much screen time.
That being said, at least one very crucial performance is an improvement over Murder on the Orient Express: Branagh is much less... just much less than he was before, or at least than my memories of his performance. His Poirot is a haunted, melancholy figure, who in witnessing all the love and thwarted love happening on the boat is trapped by his ghostly memories, and while this feels very much not at all to the point of Christie, at least it provides the film with a clear, anchor.
Beyond that, the film is mostly more of the same handsome period trappings, executed with some razzle-dazzle in the camerawork that really doesn't serve a purpose, but at least it appears to be costly. Much of the crew has returned from the 2017 film, including Zambarloukos, production designer Jim Clay, and the art direction team; editor Úna Ní Dhonghaíle and costume designer Paco Delgado are new. Either way, it's the same vibe: sets that have been fussed over with great care, filled with lots of walls of glass for Branagh to do internal framing; handsome but unmemorable costumes; stately production that happily doesn't dawdle too much in marching through the story at a crisp speed. It's all very "BBC on an enormous budget", which is pretty much the only thing Branagh ever does. The bones are Christie's bones, whatever adjustments have been made, so it's hard to feel ill-used by the story; it's not a very ingenious or insightful staging of that story, and not terribly fun either, but it's perfectly competent in a perfectly mediocre way.
