Death on the Nile
Short description
Death on the Nile is a crime mystery set in Egypt, where the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot finds his holiday on a river steamer interrupted by murder. What begins as a celebratory honeymoon for a wealthy young couple ends violently, and Poirot takes up the investigation. Suspicion spreads among the passengers, several of whom have reasons to wish the couple harm, and the case turns on working out who could have acted when the most obvious suspect appears to have an alibi. The story adapts Agatha Christie's novel of the same name and follows Kenneth Branagh's earlier Poirot film, Murder on the Orient Express.
Branagh directs and returns as Poirot, with a screenplay by Michael Green and producing work shared among Ridley Scott, Branagh and Judy Hofflund. The cast includes Tom Bateman, Annette Bening, Russell Brand, Ali Fazal and Dawn French, among a large ensemble of credited performers. The production was a substantial studio undertaking, and its worldwide gross of about 137 million dollars against a 90 million dollar budget points to a moderate commercial result rather than a runaway success.
This was the seventeenth of the eighteen features Branagh has directed in chronological order, arriving between Belfast and A Haunting in Venice, and the second of his Christie adaptations. Audience response was middling: the film holds a 6.3 rating on IMDb from roughly 209,000 votes and a 6.4 on TMDB from far fewer. A critics' rating of 5.9 from 292 reviews places professional assessment close to, and slightly below, the audience scores.
What's left behind the scenes
- The film's release date was postponed several times. Initially planned for 2019, the date was moved to 2020 due to delays in filming. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the release was further delayed, but was finally scheduled for fall 2021. On April 3, 2021, it was announced that due to a scandal involving one of the actors, Armie Hammer, the premiere was postponed again – to February 2022.
- The jewelry featured in the film was produced by Tiffany & Co. For example, the necklace included a replica of the famous yellow diamond “Tiffany,” one of the largest ever discovered. It was found in a South African mine in 1877, and by 2022, only four women had worn it publicly: Mrs. Sheldon Whitehouse at the “Tiffany Ball” in 1957, Audrey Hepburn (1929-1993) in 1961 for promotional photos for the film “Breakfast at Tiffany's,” Lady Gaga in 2019, and Beyoncé in 2021.
- Many of the film's characters are combined or completely altered versions of characters from Agatha Christie's (1890-1976) 1937 novel. This was done to simplify the plot and reduce the cast size. The author and her daughter, Salomé and Rosalind Otterburn, became a singer and her niece (who also serves as her manager) in the film. Andrew Pennington became a cousin of Andrew Katchadourian. This is not an exhaustive list of such characters.
- Although Agatha Christie wrote dozens of novels and stories about Hercule Poirot, she did not delve deeply into his past. Therefore, the details of his wartime experiences, tragic love, and the origin of the scar on his face, which led him to grow his famous mustache, were specifically invented for this film.
Auditions in India
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