“A Haunting in Venice” serves as the latest in a series of director Kenneth Branagh’s adaptations of mystery stories starring Branagh as Hercule Poirot, the famous Belgian detective character created by mystery novelist Agatha Christie. In this installment, Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey) pulls Poirot out of retirement and invites him to a seance in a Venetian palazzo that quickly becomes deadly.

Unlike Branagh’s previous Poirot adaptations such as “Murder on the Orient Express” and “Death on the Nile,” where star-studded Hollywood casts make up the ensembles of possible murder suspects, “A Haunting in Venice” restrains itself to just Branagh and Fey in the leads, as well as Michelle Yeoh as a mysterious medium and Jamie Dornan as a war-traumatized doctor. This indicates a general paring down of an excess previous installments boasted, with the focus reorienting to generating classic haunted house atmosphere and delivering a reasonably intriguing mystery yarn.

The Venetian location and architecture provides ample opportunity for off-kilter imagery, as Branagh constantly films the palazzo and Venice with purposefully asymmetrical shot compositions or claustrophobic wide-angle images. These make the characters look as small and powerless as they feel in the face of threats both human and possibly supernatural. The film depicts the prelude to the inciting murder with dreadful anticipation for the upcoming danger.   Once the investigation begins in earnest, there’s a lot of fun found in the creepy vibes the film is suffused in being challenged by the reasoning skills of Poirot and Oliver.

There’s certainly an effort to honor the contained mystery stylings of Agatha Christie that pays off in simple genre thrills, but the dramatic storylines exploring themes of grief, trauma, familial exploitation and the hunger for success don’t quite register in the way they’re supposed to. Part of it is Branagh’s portrayal of Poirot, which includes a very bold take on Belgian accents (to put it nicely), but part of it is simply that the attempt to reflect on modern issues through a previous time period’s struggles doesn’t cohere; it relies too heavily on speaking the themes instead of folding them naturally into the story as it’s happening.

It’s understandable that a mystery story must keep the audience informed on every piece of information relevant to the mystery, but it should ideally be revealed in a less self-consciously verbal fashion that rips talking points from the modern day and clumsily attaches them to past events.

“A Haunting in Venice” may lack in the emotional punch it aims to throw, but the patient unspooling of mystery information coupled with the agreeably old-fashioned approach to creating an unnerving experience keeps the film fun and enthralling from moment to moment.

3 Venetian ceiling moldings out of 5