Kenneth Branagh's Hercule Poirot is back in the first trailer for A Haunting in Venice. And this time he might be contending with a foe from beyond the grave, rather than one who merely puts people in a grave.

　　That's right, we're talking about ghosts. Watch the trailer below.

　　As we see in the trailer, the story revolves around a young girl who died in Venice a year before the events of the film. Michelle Yeoh's character helps the girl's mother perform a seance to talk to the girl--but someone is killed during it, and now Poirot has to solve a potentially new kind of case: a supernatural one.

　　The trailer is selling this angle hard, presenting a lengthy-for-a-trailer scene where Poirot stands in front of a bathroom mirror and sees the dead girl behind him, her hair soaking wet. He turns around quickly, but no one is there.

　　The third Poirot movie that Branagh has directed and starred in, A Haunting in Venice is based on the Agatha Christie novel Hallowe'en Party. This trailer, however, bears no significant resemblance to that story (which takes place in England) aside from a dead child being at the center of the plot, and Poirot being present. The novel was not a ghost story--it was just another complicated murder mystery that required a mind like Poirot's to solve. Thus the name change.

　　Is this situation actually a supernatural one? Is Hercule Poirot going to have to outwit and outsmart literal ghosts? Or is this all a smokescreen? You can find out when A Haunting in Venice lands in movie theaters in September.

　　Phil Owen on Google+