Death on the Nile

The film begins with a black-and-white trench warfare sequence explaining why Hercule Poirot has a mustache. I’m not joking. In a move that feels peak 2020s, Kenneth Branagh—who directed and stars—decided that the most famous facial hair in literary history needed a tragic, gritty origin story. It’s a bizarrely self-serious start for a movie that eventually features Gal Gadot shouting about having "enough champagne to fill the Nile," but that’s the Branagh Poirot experience in a nutshell: a strange blend of Shakespearean gravitas and high-camp melodrama.

I watched this while nursing a lukewarm cup of ginger tea that tasted faintly of disappointment, which, incidentally, is a pretty good mood ring for the film’s release history. Death on the Nile is the poster child for "cursed" contemporary cinema. It was delayed six times due to the pandemic, and by the time it actually hit theaters in 2022, half the cast was embroiled in the kind of social media firestorms that make PR agents retire to remote islands. Yet, despite the baggage, there is something stubbornly charming about this digital-heavy voyage.

The Mustache and the Mirage

The plot follows the classic Agatha Christie template: a group of wealthy, beautiful, and deeply unpleasant people are trapped in a glamorous location—this time the S.S. Karnak—while a murderer picks them off. At the center is Linnet Ridgeway (Gal Gadot), an heiress who has "everything," including her best friend’s ex-fiancé, Simon Doyle (Armie Hammer). When Linnet is inevitably found dead, Poirot has to put down his dessert and start pointing fingers.

Visually, the film is an oddity. While Haris Zambarloukos’s cinematography is sweeping, the movie was famously filmed almost entirely in a studio in England. There’s a persistent, uncanny valley quality to the Egyptian landscapes. It’s the most expensive-looking screensaver ever made, where the pyramids look less like ancient wonders and more like something rendered for a high-end luxury resort’s VR tour. I found myself distracted by the lighting; it’s so perfectly golden and consistent that it robs the Nile of its actual grit and heat. It’s a "clean" version of the 1930s that only exists in the imagination of someone who spends too much time in the Disney+ interface.

A Ship Full of Baggage

The real drama, however, is the ensemble. In a post-#MeToo and post-pandemic world, the casting of Death on the Nile became a minefield. Between Armie Hammer’s career-ending scandals and Letitia Wright’s social media controversies, the film felt like a relic of a pre-scandal Hollywood by the time we saw it. It’s hard to get swept up in the romance when you’re playing "spot the actor the editor tried to minimize."

That said, Emma Mackey (of Sex Education fame) absolutely walks away with the movie. As the jilted Jacqueline de Bellefort, she brings a jagged, desperate energy that makes everyone else look like they’re acting in a different, much more boring film. She’s the only one who seems to understand that this is a story about obsession, not just a fancy boat ride. On the other end of the spectrum, Annette Bening is clearly having a blast being miserable as a cynical painter, while Russell Brand—playing a somber doctor—is stiffer than a starched collar.

The script by Michael Green tries to add "depth" by linking the murder to Poirot’s own inability to find love. It’s a bit much. I don’t necessarily need my Belgian detectives to be tragic romantic figures; I just want them to be smarter than everyone else in the room. Branagh treats his facial hair like a Shakespearean tragedy, and while his performance is technically brilliant, it sometimes feels like he’s trying to win an Oscar for a movie that just wants to be a fun Sunday afternoon mystery.

The "Cursed" Curiosity

What makes this a contemporary "cult" curiosity is its survival. It’s a $90 million movie that felt like it was being buried by its own studio, yet it found a second life on streaming. Fans of the "Branagh-verse" have embraced the campiness of it all. Apparently, the production was so massive that they built a 225-ton version of the Karnak that actually floated in a tank, only for the digital backgrounds to make it look fake anyway.

There are other delightful nuggets of excess: Tiffany & Co. recreated the legendary yellow Tiffany Diamond for the film (the real one is over 128 carats), and the costume department had to deal with the fact that Kenneth Branagh’s mustache required its own specialized carrying case. It’s these touches of old-school Hollywood vanity that make the movie fascinating. It’s a film that shouldn’t exist in 2022—a big-budget, non-superhero, adult-oriented mystery—yet it persists through sheer force of Branagh's will.

Ultimately, Death on the Nile is a perfectly acceptable way to spend two hours, provided you don't mind the heavy scent of CGI lotus blossoms. It doesn't have the crisp, snowy perfection of Murder on the Orient Express, and it lacks the biting wit of A Haunting in Venice, but it captures a specific kind of "Old Hollywood" glamour through a very modern, slightly distorted lens. It's a messy, beautiful, occasionally baffling cruise that proves that even if you can't actually go to Egypt, you can always build a version of it in a Surrey parking lot.