The movie opens with an establishing shot of a Gothic mansion in the woods, the dark and sprightly string music letting the audience know that this is an odd place with a lot of creepy energy. We follow the housekeeper as she carries a breakfast tray through a house that’s stuffed to the rafters with antique furniture and just about every kind of high-end mystery memorabilia you can imagine (I’m pretty sure the full-sized sailor statue is a nod to the Jolly Jack Tarr statue in the 1970’s movie “Sleuth”, if that gives you an idea of what it’s like inside this place.) The housekeeper calls to Harlan Thrombey, the mansion’s owner, as she steps through a door to find Harlan dead on a couch, his throat cut and blood covering the carpet. You can tell we’re leading up to a terrified scream as the breakfast dishes fall to the floor…
…except instead the housekeeper fumbles the tray at the last second with a flustered “Shit!” We crash to the title and “Knives Out” is underway, a murder mystery with a dead millionaire patriarch and a pack of devoted family members, every one of them a suspect.
I went into this movie knowing exactly zero about it. And just like the opening scene, writer and director Rian Johnson kept making me think I knew where he was going with it. All the whodunit tropes are here: the 85th birthday party with the whole family in attendance, the mysterious death that could be a suicide, the victim’s will, and the famous detective alerted to the case with a newspaper clipping mailed to him in an envelope full of cash. And yet every time, the clues would lead up to something completely different from what I was expecting, and oh look, it’s James Bond and he’s speaking in a corn-fed drawl.
Daniel Craig is hilariously good as Benoit Blanc, skating around the edge of being ridiculous and creating a soft-spoken southern gentleman who can be a step ahead of everyone (we think), but who loves having a mystery that feels impossible to solve. ALL of the actors here are amazing: Jamie Lee Curtis, Christopher Plummer, Chris Evans. Don freaking Johnson. Sometimes a movie with this many big names makes me nervous; what if all the money was spent on the acting talent with nothing left over for writing or directing? But Rian Johnson has put together a perfect ensemble cast and he knew exactly how to have them work together. Some of the actors don’t get a lot of screen time, but it feels like everyone gets a moment to shine, and I got the sense from watching this that they all had a hell of a lot of fun with their roles.
And this kind of story looks like so much fun to tell. With an uncertain time of death and a possible motive for everyone – from the creepy youngest son to the creepy edgelord grandson who won’t get off his phone – the detective has to interview everyone about the party the night before. This means we see the party from several different angles, with each character acting a bit different depending on who’s telling the story. It doesn’t ever quite reach Rashomon levels (go see that film if you haven’t, it won’t disappoint), but everyone shades the truth juuuust a little as they try to show themselves – and their relationship with Harlan – in the best light. (Example: the scene of Harlan blowing out the candles is shown at least twice, with a different set of children happily standing at his shoulder each time). They all think they’re better human beings than they actually are.
And in many ways this entire family is just awful.
Harlan’s medical caretaker and confidant Marta Cabrera gets to see their most annoying traits up close: embezzlement, infidelity, entitled leaching. Rian Johnson gets in a lot of digs at people who can’t see past their satisfied “woke” attitude, willing to be generous as long as it doesn’t actually cost them anything, and patting themselves on the back for being kind to groups in general while treating individuals like crap. (Example: Don Johnson’s Richard finishes a speech about how valuable immigrants are, right before handing his empty plate to the medically-trained Marta to take back to the kitchen.)
Folks like this are usually completely without self-awareness. And God help you if you get in between them and something they believe they’re entitled to.
Benoit Blanc recruits the well-meaning Marta to help with the murder investigation due to the fact that she can’t tell a lie without literally throwing up. This…doesn’t actually help the detective as much as he thinks it will, although it makes for some nail-biting scenes. Emetophobes don’t need to worry about Marta’s compulsion too much. Marta is played by the drop-dead gorgeous Ana de Armas, and neither the director nor the cinematographer (Steve Yedlin, doing a stunning job in every scene) were willing to make her look disgusting, so mostly what you get are, uck, sounds.
The murder plot is way more convoluted than you think (we find out how Harlan died midway through the movie, and that doesn’t even come close to explaining what actually happened). There are confessions, complicated lies, plots, “the stupidest car chase in the world”. Best of all, the ending is richly satisfying. Although it’s probably too much to hope that the characters who come out of this the worst will realize that they only have their own worst impulses to blame. I mean, the only reason the knives can come out is if they’d been hanging onto those knives the entire time.
