Murder on the Nile, the film we risk never seeing

It should have been released on November 8, 2019, but the delays in post-production, Covid-19 and, last but not least, the scandal involving the leading actor got in the way. Armie Hammer, ended up in the eye of the storm on a sexual assault charge that continues to hang over his head. Right now, Murder on the Nile, the film directed and starring Kenneth Branagh and stopped at the starting line for the past two years, could be released in theaters on February 10, 2022, even if the director himself doesn’t seem so convinced that things are as planned. America, when it comes to such serious allegations about actors, has never gone lightly, and that doesn’t necessarily mean that Murder on the Nile could either be boycotted from the hall or, at worst, see Hammer disappear as happened with Kevin Spacey in All the money in the world.

In 2017, a few months after the Weinstein scandal broke, the production of Ridley Scott’s film decided, in fact, to purge Kevin Spacey from the title role of the film in order not to give visibility to a man who, just a few weeks earlier, had received several allegations of harassment by young boys who portrayed him as a monster. This led the studios to spend an astronomical sum to shoot all the scenes of Spacey replacing him with Christopher Plummer who, perhaps for the courage to have embarked on such a crazy undertaking, that year also took home his last nomination at the ‘Oscar. We don’t know if the same will be for Hammer, although Branagh doesn’t seem to rule it out. In a recent interview with Variety, director, fresh from the success of Belfast, premiered at the Rome Film Fest and received with great warmth by the Italian and international press, he spoke out on the issue in a cold and uncompromising manner.

“What happened is a personal and private matter of which I am unaware and which is going through a phase that must be respected. These are very serious issues that must be addressed with the utmost seriousness, “said Branagh who, after the worldwide success of Murder on the Orient Express, successful remake of Sidney Lumet’s film based on Agatha Christie’s novel of the same name, he hoped to do an encore counting on the affection of an increasingly passionate audience for the world of thrillers. “It’s a great entertainment movie that a lot of people have worked on. So many Agatha Christie fans want to see it. Many Hercule Poirot fans want to see it. I hope that one day he will see the light of the sun “, Branagh reiterated that, in addition to Hammer, for Murder on the Nile could count on the presence of Gal Gadot, Emma Mackey, Rose Leslie and Annette Bening. We don’t know how the Hammer affair will end, but it certainly would be a shame not to see the film due to the inability to detach the artistic judgment from the moral one that American industry has always struggled to put into practice.