As a Fridge page, all spoilers are unmarked!
Fridge Brilliance:
- Leopold refuses to eat the cake at the Halloween party and keeps turning down offers of cake throughout the night. As the only person who knew that Rowena had poisoned her daughter, he was justifiably wary of any food Rowena had prepared or offered—especially sweets, since the poison was in Rowena's honey.
- Rowena kept every single detail of Alicia's bedroom exactly the same as it was when she died, including the teacup left precariously dangling over the edge of the table, but allowed her daughter's treasured rooftop garden to die off. Rowena had repurposed the garden to cultivate poison from rhododendrons, and didn't need them anymore after Alicia died.
- The idea that Mrs. Oliver's novels made Poirot famous in-universe is fitting, given that she's supposed to be an Author Avatar for Poirot's creator, Agatha Christie herself! Moreover, the strain in Poirot and Mrs. Oliver's relationship that develops over the course of the film parallels Christie's own tumultuous feelings towards her most iconic character.
- Mrs. Oliver complains that her last three novels have been duds, which is why she's betting on the seance for new inspiration. It's likely that they were her first original creations, as Poirot's retirement has left her without a muse.
- Over the course of the investigation, Poirot begins to occasionally stutter, seem to lose his train of thought, and eventually outright hallucinate. Ariadne at first puts it down to the symptoms of either a concussion or his earlier near-drowning in the apple bobbing tub, and tries to get him to sit down and stop investigating. It turns out that he's actually been poisoned, unknowingly by Ariadne herself, when she made him a cup of tea as comfort following the drowning; the honey she found in the linen cupboard and added to the tea is the culprit, and the murder weapon that killed Alicia.
Fridge Horror:
- Imagine the terror and despair of the last child to die of the plague sealed in the palazzo's basement—all alone, desperately sick and in agonizing pain, starving and dehydrated, surrounded by the bodies of their friends and toys they were too weak to play with, abandoned by the adults who were meant to be taking care of them, wondering when death would finally come for them too.
- The sheer quantity of toys present in the basement with the children—a huge amount by the standards of the fourteenth century, even for a large number of children—suggests that the doctors and nurses who abandoned them were trying to assuage their guilt over leaving them behind to die by at least giving them plenty of things to play with. Or, more disturbingly, the doctors hoped to distract the children and keep them quiet so that they wouldn't try to use the little window to signal for help or escape the building.
- The toys in the movie are a little too intact-looking to have been down in a damp basement since the fourteenth century. Unfortunately, this raises an equally unsettling prospect: that Rowena Drake was not the first inhabitant of the palazzo to use the story of the children's vendetta to conceal murder, and last time there was no Poirot to figure everything out and get justice for the victims.
- Early in the film, Rowena tells Poirot and Ariadne that she got her first big starring opera role two months after her daughter was born, and credits Alicia with giving her the singing voice for her career. She then confirms to Poirot that she won't be performing again, and says she can't do it knowing that her daughter won't be waiting for her in her dressing room afterwards. At first, this just sounds like a mournful story, but after it comes out how desperately Rowena wanted to control her daughter, to the point of making her ill 'like a child' again, it offers a horrifying explanation for WHY she wanted to do this. After all, if the money was running out for the blackmail, surely she could return to the stage and get some more money, right? Unless she honestly felt she couldn't sing anymore now that her Good Luck Charm was gone...
- Leslie's relationship with his son Leopold becomes a lot more tragic and disturbing the longer you think about it. For PTSD-laden Leslie, his son was all he had left to live for and the only person able to keep him from spiraling into madness. If Rowena had followed through with her threat to kill Leopold if Leslie didn't kill himself, Leslie would've almost certainly been Driven to Suicide anyway. Furthermore, if Leslie hadn't been killed, what would've happened when Leopold had grown up and was ready to leave the nest? Would Leslie have resorted to drastic measures like Rowena for the exact same purpose of not wanting to part with his Living Emotional Crutch?
