"All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered."

― Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

#Spooktober 3 – A Haunting in Venice

I recently went to see this movie with some friends, and it’s perfectly fitting for the haunting season whether you like Banagh’s Poirot or not (I personally have mixed feelings).

It has a couple of things in common with the book of Spooktober Day 1, particularly a detective trying to shed rational light on apparently supernatural events and a general strength in the haunting atmosphere. The story draws from some of Agatha Christie’s short stories and the movie adaptation has a lot of things one might need on a Halloween night: a haunted palace in Venice, creepy masked people, the ghost of a girl who went mad and drowned herself (or did she?), ghosts of orphans out for revenge and an ancient curse, dead flowers and dead bees, a fake medium, a haunted doctor.

The mystery was very Agatha Christie: solidly built, a little obvious once you put the pieces together, with some nice twists you might not expect.
The main weakness, as far as I’m concerned, was the pursue of horror movie tropes, but – CONFESSION TIME! – I really don’t like horror movies. I find them silly. And this movie was a little silly, at times, with its attempt at jump scares.
Summertime

The Path You Have to Sing

Alexis Wright‘s Carpentaria, an epic work set in a fictional town called Desperance, opens before there are any people in it at all: an ancestral serpent, “a creature larger than storm clouds,” descends from the stars and drags itself across the wet clay of the

Read More »
August 8, 2026 6:00 am
movies and tv

But for pursuit of virtue and of knowledge

I’m sure you’ve read enough analysis of Nolan’s Odyssey to last a lifetime, and you don’t need another European ranting that he changed stuff, so I’m not going to. Instead, I’d like to talk about the movie in itself, as an independent work, granting the

Read More »
August 7, 2026 1:48 pm
Summertime

A Pilgrimage With No Shrine

The full German title of today’s book is Die Ringe des Saturn: Eine englische Wallfahrt — “The Rings of Saturn: An English Pilgrimage” — and it was written by W.G. Sebald, a German-born writer, essayist, poet, and literary scholar who lived much of his life

Read More »
August 7, 2026 6:00 am
Load More
Share on LinkedIn
Throw on Reddit
Roll on Tumblr
Mail it
No Comments

Post A Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

RELATED POSTS

The Path You Have to Sing

August 8, 2026

Alexis Wright‘s Carpentaria, an epic work set in a fictional town called Desperance, opens before there are any people in it at all: an ancestral serpent, “a creature larger than storm clouds,” descends from the stars and drags itself across the wet clay of the

Read More

But for pursuit of virtue and of knowledge

August 7, 2026

I’m sure you’ve read enough analysis of Nolan’s Odyssey to last a lifetime, and you don’t need another European ranting that he changed stuff, so I’m not going to. Instead, I’d like to talk about the movie in itself, as an independent work, granting the

Read More

A Pilgrimage With No Shrine

August 7, 2026

The full German title of today’s book is Die Ringe des Saturn: Eine englische Wallfahrt — “The Rings of Saturn: An English Pilgrimage” — and it was written by W.G. Sebald, a German-born writer, essayist, poet, and literary scholar who lived much of his life

Read More