My co-blogger and husband had to work late tonight so I watched a murder mystery alone this afternoon. Specifically I got a Hulu trial just to watch Kenneth Branagh as Poirot in Death on the Nile.

I have to admit that despite Dead Again being one of my favorite movies of all time (I was even mocked in high school for referring to the ending as “cathartic” which to be fair was an AP English vocabulary word I had just learned), despite that Branagh continues to be underrated and overlooked, by me. He’s famous and successful and one of the most ACCESSIBLE auteurs of our time, but I keep forgetting he exists until he knocks my socks off yet again.

I’m definitely obsessed with the Poirot TV series to the point that it has been the last thing I watch at night most nights for as long as I have had a Britbox subscription. But I’m not one of those people who thinks Suchet is the only Poirot. It’s just that Branagh is a different portrayal, and that’s great. He is somehow more believable here doing some of the things he does, such as chasing a killer through a hotel (yacht/floating hotel but whatever) kitchen, fighting in WW1, and lusting after a blues singer to the point that there’s a jump scare at the end where he has shaven off his mustache as a gesture to her. This Poirot is not as delicate a person, shall we say. And yet he still keeps the comedic fussiness to the point where he adjusts a murder victim’s foot so they’re both pointing in the same direction.

And as for directing others besides himself, he did us the fan service of casting French and Saunders as a couple AND got such a subdued performance out of Russell Brand that I had to reevaluate my whole opinion of Brand.

While I’m not really one who usually notices what a camera is doing, there’s a sequence in which the entire cast save Branagh is closed behind some glass doors brawling with each other, the glass has distorted them, and at the same time Branagh is symbolically and actually placed behind a railing while having a eureka moment about blood spatter diagonally on a wall. It’s one of those shots that is the reason we watch films and not just read books.

I have read this book, by the way, as a disclaimer.

In conclusion, the thing I like most about Kenneth Branagh is that he continues to cast himself along dream groups of actors (because he can) rather than appearing in genre crap to make money to finance his own bombastic work later on (not naming any names but I’m thinking in particular of two fine but late directors both named John). He just keeps on breaking the general rule that if the same guy stars and directs it’s not going to turn out well.