Review: love is Death on the Nile

“Maybe to fix a broken heart, all it takes is a single bullet.”

This neatly articulated if emotionally untidy line is delivered by the electric Emma Mackey in Kenneth Branagh’s silky new adaptation of Death on the Nile, based on the novel by Agatha Christie. In the film, Mackey plays Jacqueline de Bellefort — a woman who, by any standard, ought to be much disaffected with romance: Six weeks after introducing her childhood friend, Linnet (Gal Gadot), to her fiancé, Simon (Armie Hammer), Jackie finds herself jilted. The two have eloped, leaving her to trail after them on their honeymoon through Egypt, thrusting accusatory eyes and self-destructive witticisms at whoever will listen.

In this case, the listener is Hercule Poirot — portrayed by Branagh, who previously directed himself as the decadently-mustachioed detective in Murder on the Orient Express (2017). When they first meet, in an Egyptian market near Linnet and Simon’s hotel, Poirot advises Jackie to stop running after the newlyweds. She replies by flashing a fetching .22 caliber pistol at him. “Practically a toy,” she coos.

Later in the film, though, when everyone in the wedding party (invited or otherwise) boards the S.S. Karnak for a leisurely cruise down the eponymous body of water, the two strike a friendlier tone. Loosened by champagne, Poirot shares his own story of lost love: about how, after being wounded in the trenches during the First World War, he sent for his wife, Katharine (Susannah Fielding), who was killed by a mortar explosion on her journey to see him.

“Ah, love,” he muses. “It eez not safe.” And sure enough, before the night is through, a series of passionate confrontations lead to a murder. Lucky for the cause of justice — and those of us in the audience — that Poirot is on hand to resolve the matter.

Once known for mounting loyal, sometimes obsequious film adaptations of Shakespeare (witness his four-hour Hamlet [1996]), Kenneth Branagh has found a second wind in the last decade delivering polished entertainment for the Anglophilic set: Thor (2011); Cinderella (‘15); and Murder on the Orient Express. When I saw it more than four years ago, I was charmed by Orient Express’ dark mahogany furnishings and hypothermic lighting — not to mention its delicious cast of British bigwigs.

There’s something deeply satisfying about watching well-dressed, powerhouse actors wrestle for screen time aboard a snowbound train, so I when I first learned of Death on the Nile I was excited to watch a similar drama unfold against the arid splendor of riverside North Africa.

Generally, Branagh doesn’t disappoint with his sequel. His vision of the Nile is glamorous — though, sadly, an under-nourished CGI budget leaves Abu Simbel looking like a screensaver from a turn-of-the-century video game, while an over-saturated palette of corn-yellow pyramids and cobalt-blue skies evokes a child’s Crayola drawing rather than the Egyptian desert. Likewise, the heavyweight cast is softened by a couple of off-screen weak links: as the flighty fiancé, Armie Hammer is punishing as always, though not nearly as punishing as his we now know his real-life behavior to be, and as Linnet, an heiress surrounded by potential murderers, Gal Gadot only elaborates on her vibe as a person of immense privilege, unaware of any greater nuance to the discord that surrounds her.

“When you have money, no one is really your friend,” Linnete warns, a quiver in her lip. But this is like the sentiment of a person who remains single because all their exes are, in their own words, “crazy.” Maybe the problem is you, Linnet! I think it’s safe to say that if you invite ten people to your wedding and then realize that they all want to kill you, you might benefit from a bit of self-evaluation.

Gal’s and Armie’s extracurricular peculiarities should not distract from the rest of the lineup, though: Tom Bateman is handsome and gregarious as Bouc, an aimlessly rich man who proves just how aimless and rich he is by flying a green box kite while clutching to the side of the Great Pyramid of Giza. (“Why are you doing this?” Poirot asks. “Because no one has ever done it before!”) Annette Bening pulls her English accent out of mothballs as his mother, Euphemia, while Russell Brand tampers his down — still English, less loud — as a stiff-necked doctor and Linnet’s former fiancé. Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders play lady-companions of opposing ideologies (one’s a Communist, the other isn’t); Ali Fazal and Rose Leslie are wild-eyed with muted fury as, respectively, Linnet’s lawyer and maid; and Letita Wright is solid as niece-manager to the divine Sophie Okonedo, who plays a blues singer in the mold of Sister Rosetta Tharpe.

And Emma Mackey is a revelation. Searingly beautiful with an athletic glow and frenetic stare, she plays Jackie with volcanic abandon — inhaling the lush scenery as if she’d been raised in Nile’s rarefied bubble of digital crocodiles and sandstorms. She occupies the movie with a confidence that makes her an immediate sensation. She is a star.

Yet even a cast as charismatic as this can’t quite distract from the film’s greater weaknesses: Death on the Nile may be silky, but it’s also ill-fitting. I’ve long felt that Agatha Christie’s plots are too cute by half, often leaning on jarring conveniences and resolutions that stretch plausibility until it threatens to snap. As if that weren’t tedious enough, the better part of Nile features Poirot playing nursemaid to a bunch of rich nitwits — so by the time one of them ends up dead, it feels like Branagh must scurry to tell us whodunnit before his film reaches the commercially viable two-hour mark.

For those two hours, though, Branagh strives to give us all-star, old-school-yet-racially-inclusive opulence on a modest ninety-million-dollar budget. Who can begrudge him for the effort?

The most interesting thing he does with that time is imagine — and depict — Hercule Poirot’s traumatic past. It’s proof of Death on the Nile’s numbing frivolousness, and of Branagh’s relentless sensitivity, that the flashback sequence is totally unnecessary. We don’t need to know about Poirot’s past; all Christie’s story demands of the man is that he show up and sort out everyone else’s pain. Maybe it’s also a sign of how Marvel-ified all Hollywood movies have become: every superhero is getting an origin story these days, so why not the humble Belgian gumshoe, too?

Take it all with a grain of sand. Death on the Nile is a sound argument against infatuation — even if prettiness is its calling card.