Written and directed by Rian Johnson
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Colourful, camp to its fingertips, and contagiously fun, Knives Out is director Rian Johnson proving his mastery of the mystery, flexing the full breadth of the tight-knit storytelling prowess he showed flashes of in Brick fifteen years ago, and bringing it all to life with a troupe of actors hamming up a gallery of outsized characters.
Bestselling mystery author Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer) is found dead, throat slit, in a nook of his massive mansion. The police is ready to declare a suicide, despite the dramatic exit, and his many dependants are eyeing up their share of the man’s fortune, but there to stick his finger in the pie is gentleman detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig, ridiculous and exuberant like overpowered fireworks). Acting on an anonymous tip, he trawls the many halls, prods at testimony and pointificates in a heavy southern drawl, like a Hercule Poirot reborn south of the Mason-Dixon line.
By Ben Shapiro. Sep 13, 2016 DailyWire.com. Facebook. The long knives are out for #NeverTrump. As the election quickly approaches, many Trump.
Caught in the middle of it all is Thrombey’s assistant and confidante Marta (Ana de Armas), an unknown quantity to the self-obsessed family members but a valuable truthfinding tool to Benoit due to her falsehood-averse gag reflex. Speak no lies, spew no bile.
There’s enough deceit, intrigue and veiled looks to satisfy anyone’s hankering for a bonafide whodunnit, but the real pleasure is in the gallery of rogues that make for the suspects. Like a colourful bag of candy, the embarrassment of riches of acting firepower in the shape of Michael Shannon, Jamie Lee Curtis, Toni Colette, Chris Evans and Don Johnson all compete on the human exaggerations that are their characters, be it a jaded son, an self-important daughter-exec, a new age airhead, a freeloading grandson or a jackass son-in-law. They all double down on the eccentricities, amplify their performances and realize Knives Out in its proper camp.
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Standing opposite them all is LaKeith Stanfield, playing the straight man for once, as Lieutenant Elliott, the officer in charge of the investigation. His natural inquisitive air and sense for looking beyond what’s evident served him well as unorthodox life guru and entourage member Darius on Donald Glover’s Atlanta, and it’s an inspired fit here as well.
The excellence continues right down into the minor characters, where Jaeden Martell delivers a mostly non-verbal performance as a teenaged gloomy Ben Shapiro-wannabe alt-right troll, and Katherine Langford is an equal pleasure as his bristly social justice warrior cousin, all for the advancement of immigrants like Marta until her possible payday’s on the line.
All of this is to say that even if Knives Out was only this family of ingrates pointing fingers and trading insults, it’d still be a good time, but the complete production package delivers an experience of such visual decadence, from Johnson’s dramatic direction to David Crank’s flourish of a production design, that there’s both style, substance and satisfaction to this story of elites, their hypocrisy, and the satisfaction of their comeuppance.
Knives Out had me with the directness of its setup: a fancy manse; a rich, dysfunctional family; and a shocking murder in need of a solution. In walks Detective Benoit Blanc (played by Daniel Craig), a master crime-solver with a résumé as thick as his southern accent. “I suspect foul play … I have eliminated no suspects,” he intones when asked why he’s there. The writer and director Rian Johnson, who assembled this project quickly after spending years in the franchise-filmmaking trenches with The Last Jedi, initially seems to be seeking out simplicity—a traditional drawing-room whodunit right out of Agatha Christie’s library. But the fun really begins when Knives Out starts flouting its genre’s rules.
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That inventiveness shouldn’t be too surprising given Johnson’s career. Starting in 2005 with his breakout debut, Brick, a teenage noir homage, he’s been a filmmaker who draws from the classics but gives them sparkly new packages. Even The Last Jedi challenged the storytelling conventions of the long-winded Star Wars saga with humor and pique, rather than just reaffirming them (and stunned many a fan as a result). While Knives Out is a more straightforward proposition, a murder mystery that ties up every loose end, many of its best thrills come in the narrative hairpin turns Johnson makes along the way.
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The film keeps the crucial tropes of a Christie plot, namely ostentatious wealth, a cast of colorful characters with blaring personality disorders, and a cunning detective who lives only to crack the case before him. Yet it’s set in the present day, dispensing with the antiquated fortunes of Poirot’s usual suspects. Instead, Johnson conjures a coterie of modern, rich buffoons—all of them related to the successful crime novelist Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer), who is found stabbed on the night of his 85th birthday.
Who could’ve done it? There’s Harlan’s daughter-in-law, Joni (Toni Collette), a self-styled lifestyle guru who dispenses quack medical advice that even Gwyneth Paltrow would wrinkle her nose at. His daughter, Linda (Jamie Lee Curtis), is a real-estate mogul who constantly brags about being “self-made” despite receiving her father’s support. Harlan’s son, Walter (Michael Shannon), runs his dad’s publishing company, where his entire job seems to consist of printing and selling his father’s latest masterpiece. Even the grandkids, who include the handsome-jerk playboy Ransom (Chris Evans) and the taciturn alt-right-troll teenager Jacob (Jaeden Martell), are curdled in their own ways. Amid all the chaos and bickering, Marta (Ana de Armas), Harlan’s live-in nurse, gets patronizing head pats from the rest of the family but is otherwise largely ignored.
Detective Blanc is ostensibly the film’s hero and serves as the audience’s surrogate, interrogating family members and sniffing around for clues. But Marta is the heart of the movie—a character who might easily be dismissed as a stock supporting role, but whom Johnson plants in the foreground. There’s no subtlety to Johnson’s message: The film champions a hardworking daughter of immigrants in a film about upper-class snobs scrambling to secure their inherited wealth. This is 2019, and one of the villains is a pale teen boy who posts offensive invective on Twitter.
But the detective genre has never been subtle. It’s a world where the investigator is intelligence personified and the suspects (as well as the viewers) are his captive audience, waiting for the answers to be revealed after two hours of careful deduction. Through Marta and Detective Blanc, who become impromptu partners in search of the truth, Johnson is telling a story about what justice might look like in America today—while also having plenty of fun.
The film’s advertising has obscured almost every detail of the plot besides the absolute basics, a difficult achievement today. So I’ll say only that while Knives Out is a whodunit with a twist ending, it’s just as concerned with why and how the murder was done as it is with the killer’s identity; the seemingly huge pieces of information dropped early on turn out to be small pieces of the puzzle. The art of a cinematic murder mystery is to make the act of putting clues together seem suspenseful and worth watching. In the hands of Craig at his most gleeful, de Armas at her career best, and Johnson oozing love for the genre, Knives Out rises splendidly to the task.