Hercule Poirot’s mustache is the real victim in ‘Death on the Nile’

This article first appeared in the arts and culture section of the Montana Kaimin website on February 28th, 2022.

A perfectly handcrafted wedding party against the backdrop of 1930’s Egypt: Plenty of dancing, alcohol and motive for murder, yet everyone seems to have an airtight alibi. “Death on the Nile” has all the makings of a good murder mystery, but without much depth or any momentum to make it all that interesting — it’s just okay.

After nearly two years of pandemic-related delays, author Agatha Christie’s iconic fictional detective Hercule Poirot (Kenneth Branagh), with his egg-shaped head and immaculate mustache, returns to the big screen on the heels of the 2017 adaption “Murder on the Orient Express” to solve the mystery of the film's titular event.

On the surface the film is fun and flashy with twists and turns around every bend of the Nile. It opens with a black and white backstory that highlights a bare lipped Poirot and his love interest during his time as a soldier, and ultimately gave Poirot’s iconic mustache an origin story of it’s own.

After establishing a storyline for the mustache, which is perhaps more interesting than the murder mystery itself, the film pivots and dives into a dingy nightclub somewhere in Europe. The only thing important there is a cringy, sultry dance feature between characters Jacqueline De Bellefort (Emma Mackey), Simon Doyle (Armie Hammer) and Linnet Ridgeway (Gal Gadot). This sets the stage for a spicy yet maybe deadly love triangle.

After a six month time jump, the film finally lands back in Egypt, and slowly begins laying out all the pieces of the mystery for detective Poirot to solve. Despite the moderatley entertaining drama, gossip and sexual tension, the obvious red herrings and unconvincing outbursts of passion fall flat. But, what the film lacks in depth it makes up for in ambiguous foreshadowing scenes of river animals killing each other and ominous music paired with sweeping scenes of the desert.

As the steamer ship full of murder suspects slowly chugs down the Nile and the mystery unfolds, it's as if the plot doesn’t know where it’s supposed to go next. While this may be intended to lead the audience astray in an effort to keep them on the edges of their seat and guessing — it's just confusing. The film spends most of its time leisurely trudging along that by the time the action finally happens, all interest is lost.

Yet with all this time devoted to setting up the mystery, it fails to devote enough time to making the audience care about any of the characters, so when someone dies, do we really care? No. The only character that Branagh — who also directed the film — attempts to make relatable at all is Poirot, which makes no sense. The Belgian detective earns his notoriety for being so much of an egotistical maniac that even his creator is rumored to have hated the monster she created.

Overall though, the film is not all bad. Ineffective pacing aside, the general air of the glamorous upper class waltzing along one of the world's most famous rivers in dazzling get-ups might just be enough to make you long to be a member of 1930s high society (without all the death).

And at least the story ends back at that dingy nightclub — where out of all characters, it’s Poirot's mustache that gets a satisfying, if unrealistic, ending.

“Death on the Nile” is available in theaters now.