Jamie Dornan to collaborate with Kenneth Branagh once more in Agatha Christie film adaptation

Holywood-born actor and heart-throb Jamie Dornan, who most recently wowed audiences as ‘Pa’ in Kenneth Branagh’s autobiographical love letter to his home city, Belfast, will again collaborate with the director, and his onscreen son in the latter movie, Jude Hill, in a forthcoming film adaptation of crime writer Agatha Christie’s 1969 novel ‘Hallowe’en Party’.

Dornan and Hill will be joined by Tina Fey, Ali Khan, Emma Laird, Michelle Yeoh (most recently seen in the surrealistically brilliant ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’) and others in the film, which will be titled ‘A Haunting in Venice’.

Describing the new movie, IMDB said: "In post-World War II Venice, Poirot, now retired and living in his own exile, reluctantly attends a seance, when one of the guests is murdered, it is up to the former detective to once again uncover the killer."

According to Deadline, Branagh said: "This is a fantastic development of the character Hercule Poirot, as well as the Agatha Christie franchise. Based on a complex, little known tale of mystery set at Halloween in a pictorially ravishing city, it is an amazing opportunity for us, as filmmakers, and we are relishing the chance to deliver something truly spine-chilling for our loyal movie audiences."

This comes after Branagh directed and starred as Poirot in 2017’s Murder on the Orient Express and this year’s Death on the Nile.

A Haunting in Venice is 20th Century's third film based on a novel by Agatha Christie.

What is A Haunting In Venice about?

The novel of the same name opens in Venice, Italy, just after WW II on All Hallows’ Eve. That’s quite a mix of tantalising atmospheres. The drama begins when a 13-year-old girl is found dead in an apple-bobbing tub. The girl had once come forward claiming she witnessed a murder as an even younger child. Poirot is called out of retirement and “self-imposed exile” to attend a séance at an old palazzo with a reputation for being haunted. Being a tale set around Halloween, expect some supernatural elements.

Production is supposedly beginning on October 31, 2022, an auspicious day for a movie about a Halloween haunting. There is no release date yet except for the year 2023, but if they are keeping it on track to be a spooky experience, keep your eyes open for announcements next autumn.

Tell us more about Agatha Christie and her work?

Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie, Lady Mallowan, DBE (née Miller; 15 September 1890 – 12 January 1976) was an English writer known for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, particularly those revolving around fictional detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. She also wrote the world's longest-running play, the murder mystery The Mousetrap, which has been performed in the West End since 1952.

A writer during the "Golden Age of Detective Fiction", Christie has been called the "Queen of Crime".

In 1971, she was made a Dame (DBE) by the late Queen Elizabeth II for her contributions to literature. Guinness World Records lists Christie as the best-selling fiction writer of all time, her novels having sold more than two billion copies.

Hallowe'en Party, which Kenneth Branagh is set to adapt for the big screen, was first published in the UK by the Collins Crime Club in November 1969 and in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company later in the same year.

The novel features Belgian detective Hercule Poirot and the mystery novelist Ariadne Oliver, who begins the novel in attendance at a Hallowe'en party. Joyce Reynolds, 13, at the party claims she witnessed a murder, which, at the time, she was too young to realise was a murder. Soon, the girl herself is found murdered, and Oliver calls in Poirot. The book was dedicated to P. G. Wodehouse.

The first half of the novel contains several discussions in which anxiety is voiced about the criminal justice system in Great Britain. This in part reflects the abolition in 1965 of capital punishment for murder.

According to crime writer P. D. James, Christie, throughout her substantial body of work, was prone to making the unlikeliest character the guilty party. Alert readers could sometimes identify the culprit by identifying the least likely suspect.

But Christie mocked this insight in her foreword to Cards on the Table: "Spot the person least likely to have committed the crime and in nine times out of ten your task is finished. Since I do not want my faithful readers to fling away this book in disgust, I prefer to warn them beforehand that this is not that kind of book."

On the genesis of Hercule Poirot

Poirot is one of Christie's most famous and long-running characters, appearing in 33 novels, two plays (Black Coffee and Alibi), and more than 50 short stories published between 1920 and 1975.

Poirot has been portrayed on radio, in film and on television by various actors, including Peter Ustinov, Orson Welles, David Suchet, and our very own Kenneth Branagh.

A important inspiration in the creation of Poirot is to be found in the work of Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes.

In An Autobiography, Christie states, "I was still writing in the Sherlock Holmes tradition – eccentric detective, stooge assistant, with a Lestrade-type Scotland Yard detective, Inspector Japp". For his part, Conan Doyle acknowledged basing his detective stories on the model of Edgar Allan Poe's C. Auguste Dupin and his anonymous narrator, and basing his character Sherlock Holmes on Joseph Bell, who in his use of "ratiocination" prefigured Poirot's reliance on his "little grey cells".

Christie initially describes Poirot in The Murder on the Orient Express: “By the step leading up into the sleeping-car stood a young French lieutenant, resplendent in uniform, conversing with a small man [Hercule Poirot] muffled up to the ears of whom nothing was visible but a pink-tipped nose and the two points of an upward-curled moustache.”