“Murder in Venice”, this is how Agatha Christie's novel inspires Hercule Poirot's latest cinematic adventure

In recent years Hercule Poirot, the famous detective invented by Agatha Christie, has returned to the limelight on the big screen in a series of films directed and starring the star Kenneth Branagh. The last film in the series arrived in theaters in the autumn of 2023, it is titled "Murder in Venice" and is freely inspired by one of the crudest noir adventures born from the fervent talent of Agatha Christie. Hercule Poirot finds himself, in fact, investigating the ruthless execution of a 13-year-old girl, Joyce, suffocated in water during a Halloween party a few hours after boasting of having witnessed a murder. Nobody believed her, also because the young woman was considered a petulant professional liar. His death, however, creates a climate of suspicion and deception among people who attended the party. Called to investigate, it will be up to the famous Hercule Poirot to discover - in that night of occultism and deception - the evil presence responsible for the crime through an investigation that is considered by enthusiasts and critics to be one of the best to come out of Christie's pen.

The novel, also known by the title "The Massacre of the Innocents" and now renamed in the wake of the film "Murder in Venice" (Oscar Mondadori, 2023, pp. 240) «is a book that leaves you shocked: if the choice of the victim is cold and ruthless, the complications that come to light as Poirot's investigations progress are chilling", claims Michael Green, who based the screenplay of the film directed by Kenneth Branagh on these pages.

On the one hand, in the book we find some of the trademarks of the great British mystery writer: a series of crimes of which that of the young Joyce is only the most brutal, a large group of suspects, dozens of clues which in the end never provide definitive proof. , moments of suspense but also brilliant dialogues full of English humour. However, an underlying bitterness and a sense of claustrophobia prevail in the book, probably linked to the fact that the narrative reflects on the one hand the disturbing echo of ancient legends and gothic atmospheres, and on the other the profound social and cultural changes of the turbulent 1960s. Novecento (the novel is from 1969). The story is also expertly constructed as a sort of labyrinth in which, instead of finding ways out, even the reader with the most investigative intuition loses his bearings, no longer knows who to trust and who to side with, in a crescendo of tension that Christie admirably manages to hold up until the end.

In short, Murder in Venice is an almost perfect mystery mechanism as well as a great novel about human nature and its abysses, those abysses that push us to have no mercy even for the innocent.