Holding out for a hero in 2024

The setting of “Hallowe’en Party”, a whodunit by Agatha Christie, is, she writes, “an ordinary sort of place”. “A Haunting in Venice”, an extremely loose screen adaptation released in September, moves the action from a nondescript English village to a palazzo on the Grand Canal, stirring in witchery and a séance. Yet amid the added glitz and ghouls, in one important and telling way—typical of a leery, disillusioned age—the film dims the story’s magic. Like other popular franchises, it undermines its own hero, Hercule Poirot.