Kenneth Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express pulls into the station with a first-class cast and a second-class script. The 2017 film runs 114 minutes, carries the tagline “Everyone is a suspect,” and lands at 5.2/10.
Branagh directs and stars as Hercule Poirot, the Belgian detective who boards the Simplon-route train in the 1930s after solving a theft in Jerusalem. Michael Green wrote the screenplay, adapting Agatha Christie’s 1934 novel. What follows is a murder mystery that looks expensive and thinks cheap.
Trailer, via 20th Century Studios.
A Passenger List Built for the Poster
The cast is the film’s best argument for itself. Michelle Pfeiffer plays Caroline Hubbard. Johnny Depp plays Edward Ratchett, the American tycoon found stabbed a dozen times. Judi Dench is Princess Natalia Dragomiroff. Willem Dafoe, Josh Gad, Derek Jacobi, Leslie Odom Jr., Daisy Ridley, Penélope Cruz and Olivia Colman round out the roster.
That is a lot of names, and Murder on the Orient Express knows it. The film treats each star as a piece of furniture to be lit and admired, not a character to be developed. Tom Bateman’s Bouc, Poirot’s friend and the nephew of the train’s owner, gets the most to do among the supporting players, mostly because he stands next to Branagh.
The Case Itself
Ratchett, fearing for his life, tries to hire Poirot as protection. Poirot declines, unwilling to do business with a suspicious character. An avalanche derails the engine, stranding everyone until a rescue crew can re-rail the locomotive. That night Poirot hears strange noises and sees someone in a red kimono rushing down the aisleway. By morning Ratchett is dead.
Poirot and Bouc hunt the murderer together. The detective finds the burned remnants of a threatening note and deduces that Ratchett was really John Cassetti, the gangster behind the kidnap and murder of Daisy Armstrong, an infant.
The Armstrong Family
The backstory arrives in a rush of grief. Daisy’s death sent her mother Sonia into premature labour, killing her and the baby. Her father, Colonel John Armstrong, killed himself. The family maid, Susanne, accused of complicity in Daisy’s murder, also took her own life.
The film gives these deaths no room to land. They are exposition, delivered so the final reveal has something to stand on. Murder on the Orient Express needs you to feel the Armstrong family’s loss, and it never lets you near them.
Where the Mystery Goes
The solution assembles the passengers into a conspiracy of grief. Pfeiffer’s Hubbard is revealed as Linda Arden, the noted actress, mother of Sonia Armstrong and grandmother of Daisy. Dafoe’s professor is really Cyrus Bethman Hardman, the American lover of Susanne. Odom’s Dr. Arbuthnot is Mary Debenham’s secret lover and a former army sniper. Dench’s princess was Daisy’s godmother.
Every reveal lands with the same weight, which is to say not much. Murder on the Orient Express stacks its twists like plates and never lets the reader feel the table strain.
65mm and Not Much Else
Principal photography began in November 2016 in the United Kingdom. The production used 65 mm film cameras, one of the few in recent decades to do so. You can see where the money went: the train interiors, the snowbound exteriors, the mustache.
You cannot see where the thought went. Branagh’s direction favors sweeping shots of the locomotive over the claustrophobia that makes a train mystery work. A story about a dozen suspects trapped in a stranded carriage should feel like a trap. This one feels like a tour.
The Detective’s Mustache
Branagh’s Poirot is defined first by facial hair and second by method. The film gives him little else to work with, and he solves the case because the script says he is a genius, not because we watch him be one.
The world premiere was held on November 2, 2017, at the Royal Albert Hall in London. The film was released theatrically in the United Kingdom on November 3 and in the United States on November 10, distributed by 20th Century Fox. It grossed over $353 million worldwide.
Ranking the Suspects
The ensemble is the whole pitch, so rank the ensemble by what it actually delivers:
- Michelle Pfeiffer — the only performance with a real turn inside it, and the film’s emotional center when it finally arrives.
- Tom Bateman — Bouc carries the exposition and most of the humor without straining.
- Daisy Ridley — Mary Debenham gets a genuine scene or two before the crowd swallows her.
- Judi Dench — Princess Dragomiroff, Daisy’s godmother, gets the least screen time of the top-billed names and still registers.
- Johnny Depp — Ratchett is a corpse for most of the runtime, which may be the role’s best feature.
- Leslie Odom Jr. and Penélope Cruz — capable actors given almost nothing to play.
- Josh Gad, Derek Jacobi, Olivia Colman, Willem Dafoe — each gets a character with a defined role in the case, and each is gone before the role has room to breathe.
What the Sequels Showed
Murder on the Orient Express received mixed reviews, with praise for the cast and production values and criticism for the screenplay and its redundancy against earlier adaptations. Two sequels followed: Death on the Nile in 2022 and A Haunting in Venice in 2023. Both drew improved critical reception and diminishing commercial performance.
That trajectory is the real read on this film. The 2017 Murder on the Orient Express sold a formula — stars, snow, mustache — and the formula worked once. The sequels did not repeat that result, because there was never anything underneath it but the formula.
Murder on the Orient Express is not a bad night at the movies. It is a forgettable one, which is worse for a mystery. Christie’s puzzle is famous because the solution rearranges everything you thought you saw. This adaptation films the rearranging without earning the shock, so the reveal plays as information rather than as damage. The 65 mm photography is genuinely beautiful, and Pfeiffer’s final scenes are the only moments where the film remembers it is about grief. Everything else is casting as spectacle. Branagh has made a movie that trusts its passenger list more than its plot.
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