Rating: PG-13
Runtime: 2 hours, 7 minutes
Director: Kenneth Branagh
Quick Impressions:
Before my mother became the world’s biggest fan of David Suchet’s Poirot, there was a time when I was in high school that she and my grandma used to watch Peter Ustinov in the 1978 film Death on the Nile every. single. day. I suppose the extreme Death on the Nile binge really only happened for a short time in 1995 (though they had always enjoyed the movie). But I reiterate that they watched it every. single. day. We were living in Laredo at the time (and we only lived there for six months. Still though. Every. Single. Day.) I remember once Mom and Grandma went out shopping, and my sister and I gleefully grabbed the remote and started flipping through channels. To our horror, what did we discover on Telemundo? Death on the Nile! (In español!) (¿¿¿Por que???)
I mentioned this to my sister recently, and she recalled further, “Oh yeah, what I mainly remember is that then Mom and Grandma walked in the front door and were like, ‘Oh good! Death on the Nile is on!”
So I’ve seen Death on the Nile a few times. (Make no mistake. They didn’t stop watching it after those six months were up. They just stopped watching it as often.)
And I won’t lie, I kind of love Death on the Nile (no doubt due to a phenomenon commonly known as brainwashing). The 1978 one is such a fun watch. I particularly love Angela Lansbury as Salome Otterbourne, the writer I’ve always dreamed of becoming…eventually (after first becoming a successful writer). (Mom would always admire Lansbury’s gift for accessorizing, no matter the production. Grandma loved to remind us that Peter Ustinov was Angela Lansbury’s ex-brother-in-law, so often that this got filed in my brain under Important.) My mother loved the (fantastic) pairing of Maggie Smith and Betty Davis and frequently walked around saying, “This place is beginning to resemble a mortuary.” The entire cast of that film is fantastic. (In retrospect, I begin to think that my mother hated living in Laredo and enjoyed her escapist fantasy of, “Wouldn’t life be a lot more fun if we were stuck in a cozy mystery set on a boat in Egypt and everyone kept dying?”) (Her favorite part was all the bodies being carried off the boat at the end.)
My grandma and I used to argue about which was better, Death on the Nile or Murder on the Orient Express. (Well, it was less an argument than me saying, “Yes, I know you like Death on the Nile better, but I prefer Murder on the Orient Express,” and then her expressing shock for forty-five minutes. Sidney Lumet’s Murder on the Orient Express is a masterpiece! I don’t care how much you’re my grandma, I still think that’s the superior film. I will agree, though, that Death on the Nile is easier to watch casually millions of times (largely because it’s already on at your house every day). The David Suchet version is pretty good, too. (In that one, I like Frances de la Tour as Salome Otterbourne, so I guess I just like Salome Otterbourne. Emily Blunt’s in that one, too!) (Once again, my mom liked the ending the best, the grudging Mr. Darcy like proposal followed by the immediate rebuff.)
Perhaps I’ve made it clear that this movie made me think a lot of my mother. I wish I could have seen it with her. We all saw and enjoyed Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express and were thrilled to see a sequel had been greenlit. And then things just seemed to be holding it up indefinitely. First Jodie Comer wasn’t available, then the pandemic, and then…
Armie Hammer! Do you know how many serial killers who actually ate people managed to keep it on the down low for years? If you can’t quit abusing women and pretending you’re a cannibal, could you at least keep it quiet, so it doesn’t continue derailing all your upcoming projects and messing up things for the people working with you and disappointing the audience? (I would get so mad and rail at my husband, “I swear if this movie ends up getting shelved completely just because Armie Hammer can’t quit ‘not’ eating people…” That was so frustrating to me!)
Honestly, anyone who has seen Death on the Nile knows that Armie Hammer is perfect for the part of Simon Doyle. (He already was before we all knew he wasn’t a cannibal.) (I still don’t understand why I’m finding out about that. I live in Hutto. If you were a cannibal who wanted a career in movies, wouldn’t you be smarter about it? Only the smart cannibals survive.)
Hammer has the right kind of charisma to play Simon whether you know why he exudes that sort of presence or not. In the future, nobody will care that he’s in this movie, and regardless of how the film is received now, it should find a niche audience waiting to embrace it. (I don’t mean cannibal fetishists. I mean Agatha Christie enthusiasts, or perhaps fans of Kenneth Branagh.)
(Hammer’s presence makes me think of my mother, too. The last film we watched together was the Netflix Rebecca. We watched it to celebrate her birthday only days before she died. I’m so glad I found the time to watch that increasingly bad Rebecca adaptation.) (The whole thing has its bright spots but it falls apart increasingly as it progresses.)
The Good:
I like Branagh’s take on these Poirot classics. He’s presenting them as if they’re Shakespearean tragedies (no surprise), playing up the psychological drama, exploring the underlying trauma that makes these characters behave in the ways that they do. That, at least, gives him a reason to remake these movies. He’s doing something different with them. (And yet it’s not coming wildly out of left field because Murder on the Orient Express embraces all the Lady Macbeth stuff, and Death on the Nile is clearly flirting with Antony and Cleopatra.)
You watch these new films and think, “Ah, yes, this does feel like the way you would expect Kenneth Branagh to present an Agatha Christie story.” I would watch more Branagh Poirot movies (though the ending doesn’t really tease a sequel). So would my husband.
The year we saw Murder on the Orient Express, it seemed like screenwriter Michael Green wrote every movie. (He didn’t actually, of course, but he did write Logan, the story for Alien Covenant, and Blade Runner 2049 in addition to Murder on the Orient Express. That’s a lot of high-profile stuff in the same year. We were thrilled when we saw he was writing an adaptation of Death on the Nile. Both my mother and I were all over these Branagh Poiroits. Through different channels, we kept discovering clues about the likelihood of a second film.)
I was happy to see Gal Gadot join the project and thrilled to learn that she would be playing Linnet Ridgeway. (Anyone but Lois Chiles! My mom hated her so much. I can’t objectively evaluate her in the role because I can only hear all of my mother’s incessant complaints.)
With Gadot in the role, it’s not surprising that Linnet is more sympathetic than usual. I like the way this version plays up her terror, makes us feel how uncomfortable she is, unable to trust anyone. We feel for her. (Everyone she’s ever known in her life has been using her for money. She doesn’t trust that anyone on the boat might not be trying to kill her, and these are her friends and family, the people she herself invited to celebrate her wedding. That’s very sad, and we feel for her. And, of course, if you’re familiar with the story, there’s heart-breaking dramatic irony in some of her observations.) Gadot (and Green and Branagh) make Linnet easier to like (and definitely harder to hate) than usual.
When I heard that Jodie Comer was attached to play Jaqueline De Bellefort, I wasn’t too excited because I don’t watch Killing Eve and only know about it because of awards shows (how I learn about all prestige TV that nobody wants to watch but me). But then when I saw her in The Last Duel, I felt a pang of regret that she had left the production. Emma Mackey is perfectly good as Jackie, though I prefer Mia Farrow. I think this is because Green and Branagh have built up Linnet’s part for Gadot and somewhat diminished Jackie. (I’m not necessarily talking about screentime, just that Gadot feels like she’s in the star role here, whereas Farrow seems to be the star of the other movie.) (Of course, the most important character is always Poirot.)
I loved Tom Bateman as Bouc in Murder on the Orient Express and was excited he was returning for Death on the Nile. He’s one of my favorite parts of these Branagh Poirot movies, just a breath of fresh air. I’d love to see him return as Bouc again, though this film doesn’t seem to tease a sequel like Murder on the Orient Express.
Russell Brand wins as the character who most outsmarted me. I spent the entirety of the movie trying to recognize the actor playing Dr. Windlesham. At first glance, I thought, “I don’t recognize him. I must not know him,” and then he would speak and I’d think, “No, I know that actor very well. What was he in?” I tried to place him the whole time I watched. (My husband didn’t recognize him either. We both cried out in shock in the credits. But take that with a grain of salt because he never recognizes anyone. When I met him, he knew almost no actors and even wondered if he was face blind.) Brand is very good in this role. I always think of him as a comedian, but he gives one of the more memorable performances of the film, not played for laughs at all. (That’s another reason I thought, “This can’t be nobody. He’s too good an actor.”) (That makes no sense, of course, because many stage actors are the very best actors and not well known by random movie goers.)
I found myself wishing Annette Benning’s part were bigger—and I did think an aspect of her painting was clumsily obvious—but then, I’ve seen the movie 800,000 times before. While I missed Bette Davis and Maggie Smith, I did think the pairing of Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French was inspired, and I wished they’d been in the movie more, too. (They’re in the movie a lot. I just wanted a bit more.) (I felt this with most characters in Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express, too. I’m wondering if what I’m noticing is that he gives more time to developing and exploring Poirot himself as a character.)
Once again, I found myself loving Salome Otterbourne. (This time she’s a singer, not a writer, but she’s amazing.) Sophie Okonedo makes her pretty funny (as the character always is), but this version of Salome also refuses to be the butt of the joke. Both my husband and I were charmed by the Otterbournes. Salome and Rosalie (Letitia Wright) were our favorite characters in this film. (It helps that we already liked Letitia Wright.) Clearly Branagh and Green like the Otterbournes the best, too, because they’re tremendously showchased this time around.
The characters are all a bit different from the 1978 version, but what is brought to the situation by each 1978 character is still there, just sometimes provided now by a different character. Similarly even though key elements of the plot remain the same, the film does make some major changes to aspects of the mystery that do leave viewers in some suspense. We also get a story thematically centered on Poirot who emphasizes love and its profound affects for us again and again. I enjoyed the partial origin story and suggested ending that the film gives us for Poirot himself.
I also liked Ali Fazal as cousin Andrew, a character whose love for Linnet and gradual psychological unraveling we see much more clearly in this version than in some.
Best Action Sequence:
There’s one moment of this movie that has you asking not, “Whodonnit?” but “Who are they gonna donnit to?” There are several crimes in Death on the Nile, and it’s not immediately apparent who has committed one of them. It’s also uncertain if a key plot element will happen, and if so, to whom it will happen. When this all comes together, we get a chase scene that I like as Poirot pursues a perpetrator that we keep catching in brief, partial glimpses.
Best Scene:
I sort of like Poirot’s semi-intoxicated confession to Rosalie simply because this is not in every version of Death on the Nile. I actually like every scene featuring the Otterbournes because, honestly, this is an entirely different story than what we usually get in Death on the Nile, and yet Branagh crams it into the same movie and somehow makes it work.
Best Scene Visually:
I love all the symmetry in this movie (so important to Poirot). And the Cleopatra moment almost provides some strange comedy. Perhaps what appeals to me most is a red herring that we get. (It’s hard to identify as a red herring at first because it isn’t red. But I like the suggestion that while Poirot has been focusing on some ridiculous display of theatrics, something that genuinely matters to him has escaped his attention with personally devastating consequences.
The Negatives:
The people trying to create all the drama are not given as much opportunity to make a scene here. In the 1978 version we get lots of amateur theatrics of love gone wrong. This version focuses on the real human drama of love gone wrong, which I find fascinating. And why would you want to do something that’s already been done?
Still I do kind of miss all the theatrics. Then again, why should horrible people get all the attention? I do think it’s interesting that Poirot shows the audience the motive of a murderer by revealing that motive (and the intensity of it) in all of the people who are not murderers. Then we really don’t need any long, protracted speeches by that murderer because all of the non-murderers have demonstrated the power of that motive for us already.
Personally, I view this film as a companion piece to earlier iterations of Death on the Nile. It’s not the version of the story I’d see first if you’re unfamiliar with the film and its plot.
Not everybody is going to like this. Some people probably just won’t go because of Armie Hammer. Some people won’t go because of omicron. Some people just were never going to go anyway.
I have no idea what kind of reviews Death on the Nile will get or what people new to the story will make of the film. As someone who has seen the 1978 movie millions of times, I appreciated the fresh spin on it. I would guess that Agatha Christie fans who have already seen (and/or read) Death on the Nile are the primary audience for this film. They might not all go to the theater to see it, but they will watch it eventually. (My mom was in some Poirot fan group online, and they all completely hated the John Malkovich take on Poirot in that ABC Murders. (I myself found it kind of interesting, though I agree with her that it seemed like a deliberate changing of the Poirot character (whereas Branagh’s is more of an interpretation of the existing character). Malkovich was like alternate universe Poirot. But my point is, even though they all hated it (according to my mom), they all watched it and discussed it anyway.
Overall:
If you like either Agatha Christie mysteries or Kenneth Branagh’s films, you should enjoy Death on the Nile. It’s especially good if you’re already familiar with the story. This version gives us a bit of Poirot’s backstory and teases a happy ending for him instead of a sequel. (My husband and I would both watch a sequel though.)