YMMV / Knives Out

---

• Abandon Shipping:
  • A very common reaction to Marta x Ransom, although it's still amassed a considerable Angel/Devil Shipping fanbase. Just to recap, he's a bigoted Jerk with a Heart of Jerk who attempts to frame an innocent immigrant's daughter for murder and tries to kill her when he's caught. Before The Reveal, however, it's easy to get caught up in the attractiveness of and the chemistry between Chris Evans and Ana de Armas.
  • Similarly, the beginning of the film lead some viewers to ship Marta with Meg, due to the obvious closeness between them and Meg seemingly being a White Sheep to her family, similarly to Harlan. Only for almost all potential shippers to completely drop it after Meg betrays Marta’s confidence and reveals her mother’s illegal immigrant status to her family — who Meg knows are racist and xenophobic, and currently working against Marta. A few fics still have a remorseful Meg get together with Marta after pulling a Heel–Face Turn.
• Accidental Aesop:
  • Fran the housekeeper mentions watching lots of Hallmark detective movies and bustles around in the background trying to be an Amateur Sleuth. It ultimately gets her killed, and lets the true culprit get close to destroying the last bit of evidence incriminating him, when she tries to call him out and confront him. In other words, don't assume that you're competent to do something just because you consume a lot of media about it. Even if you do manage to find useful information, you're probably not qualified to handle the consequences compared to a trained professional.
  • If Harlan had listened when Marta told him they should call an ambulance after his alleged overdose, he'd still be alive. In other words: if you have a doctor, nurse, or other healthcare professional you trust, listen to them. You pay them for a reason.
• Adorkable: Trooper Wagner, for all his murder mystery genre fanboying and generally sweet demeanor.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: Has its own page.
• Angel/Devil Shipping: Perhaps unsurprisingly, Marta/Ransom is a popular ship. One's the All-Loving Heroine, the other is a greedy, murderous slimebag who tries to frame (and eventually kill) her.
• Award Snub:
  • Rian Johnson's screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award, but the film itself was not nominated for Best Picture (despite considerable acclaim) and Ana de Armas was likewise overlooked for Best Actress.
  • Daniel Craig failing to get a nomination for either Best Actor or Best Supporting Actor is equally slighting.
  • Best Costume Design is another category the film should have received consideration in.
  • Best Production Design would have been a well-deserved for a film where the house is a character in itself.
• Awesome Music: The entire score, but especially the main theme by Nathan Johnson, which Cinema Wins accurately describes as "somehow a parody of a whodunnit score while still being a whodunnit score".
• Base-Breaking Character:
  • Meg. Some fans feel that she's just as bad as her family, especially considering she outed Marta's mother as undocumented, and that all her talk about social justice is just lip service because she protected her money when the chips were down. Others feel that she does believe in what she was saying, and was just forced to tell Marta's secret because of family pressure.
  • Marta herself. While many viewers considered her a bright spot among the cast, others found her to be too squeaky-clean and sanitized to really give a damn about. There was some discussion when the film was released about whether she played into the condescending-racist "good little immigrant" idea, where people of color are considered worthy of reward not because of their actual merit but because they're just such good people.
• Captain Obvious Reveal: From the moment Ransom is introduced onscreen, the character is so obviously guilty of something, down to having an ominous name and triggering the evil detecting dogs, it almost seems like the movie is setting up a Red Herring. Nope.
• Catharsis Factor:
  • Seeing Marta puking all over Ransom's face is just SO satisfying to watch, not just because said character deserves it for what he's just revealed to have done, but also because of what it means: she just lied about Fran still being alive, and Ransom is going to go to prison for essentially confessing to her murder.
  • Ditto for watching Benoit absolutely rip into the Thrombeys for their treatment of Marta and trying to steal a fortune that's rightfully hers. Not to mention the power shift in which now the family realizes in the end they have no choice now but to accept that Marta has all the power and hope that she won't be harsh on them all.
• Diagnosed by the Audience: Marta has a strange condition where she vomits whenever she tells a lie, which could be a form of anxiety disorder.
• Draco in Leather Pants:
  • Ransom. If you look like Chris Evans and are one of the most entertaining characters in the movie, fans will forgive anything, including arson, murder, attempted murder, elitism, racism, and general jerkassery.
  • Meg also has a lot of defenders who will try to justify her selling out Marta's secret about her mother's immigration status so the family could blackmail her, even though it was an incredibly selfish and (given her previously voiced political opinions) hypocritical thing to do no matter what kind of pressure she was under. It is also perhaps somewhat telling that the only other member of the Thrombey family, a clan all but outright stated throughout the film to be universally unpleasant, over-entitled hypocrites, that viewers are willing to defend and think the best of also happens to be a young, attractive woman who espouses left-leaning political positions (that she may not fully believe).
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Trooper Wagner for all his Adorkable fanboy-like interest in the case and his reactions to every new revelation.
• Estrogen Brigade: Let's just say that there are a ton of folks interested in the film purely because they put Chris Evans in a cable-knit sweater.
• Fanon: Virtually all fans have agreed that Blanc and Marta remain in touch after the events of the film, often portraying them as becoming close friends.
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • Fans of this film usually like Ready or Not and vice versa, what with their ripping takedowns of the wealthy, smart and scrappy leading ladies, and big fancy houses. Many fans like to imagine Grace and Marta meeting and becoming friends or even a couple.
  • Fans of The Last Jedi (or even those who disliked it but were surprised by this film) took a liking to this, for seeing Rian Johnson direct a film not hampered by studio interference.
  • With No Time to Die, thanks to Daniel Craig getting Ana de Armas her role in that film—however brief, that role being praised and their chemistry still being in effect there too.
  • With the Apple TV+ mystery comedy series The Afterparty, as both properties homage the murder-mystery genre and its many tropes. Double that up given that their respective creators Rian Johnson and Christopher Miller are well-known for their subversive takes on genres. Also, the heavy Product Placement of Apple devices in both works.
• Genius Bonus:
  • Those with knowledge of the actual process of criminal investigation have an upper hand at guessing the twist because since the toxicology and autopsy reports are two of the first things done to a deceased individual whose cause of death is uncertain, the fact that the police are still operating on the presumption of suicide at the beginning of the film a whole week after the death gives away that the toxicology report came back normal.
  • A subtle Running Gag throughout the film is that the Thrombeys are very inconsistent in where they think Marta and her family came from. In several different scenes, they matter-of-factly claim she's from Ecuador, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Brazil. It is noteworthy that the official language in Brazil is Portuguese, instead of the three countries mentioned, in which the official language is Spanish. This is yet more proof of the Thrombeys' ignorance.
• He's Just Hiding: There are some fans who think Marta threw up on Ransom not because she'd lied that Fran was alive, but that she'd lied that Fran was dead. Or, to put it another way, that Fran did survive but Marta pretended otherwise to trick Ransom into attacking her.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Early in the film, Walt mentions to Harlan that Netflix had expressed interest in handing over a handsome amount of money to make adaptations of his books, which Harlan is dismissive of. This very film's runaway success was so huge that Netflix actually took notice and offered Rian Johnson a whopping $400M deal for the rights of the next two Knives Out sequels, making the Product Placement here feel like a retroactive Enforced Plug on Johnson's part.
  • Daniel Craig and Ana de Armas share a scene in No Time to Die, in which their respective role has been swapped compaired to Knives Out. In the latter movie, Craig is the serious main character and de Armas is a goofy supporting character displaying some amounts of Obfuscating Stupidity but who turns out to be very competent.
  • Richard briefly quoting Hamilton early in the movie becomes this given that Aaron Burr's original and most well-known actor from that play, Leslie Odom Jr., plays Lionel Toussaint in Glass Onion.
  • Benoit Blanc singing along to Follies of all things as the ambulance arrives to try to resuscitate a poisoned Fran is already darkly funny, but becomes even more humorous when Glass Onion revealed that Blanc is friends with Stephen Sondheim in-universe, to the point of trying to play Among Us with him during the height of the COVID-19 Pandemic.
• Jerks Are Worse Than Villains: Ransom is easily the worst member of the Thrombey family, being a greedy, psychopathic murderer and manipulative schemer. The rest of the Thrombey family, on the other hand, mostly put on a facade of affable charm in an attempt to mask their bigoted and jerkass ways. The only two members that don’t try to hide their jerkassery are Jacob and Richard, the former being an alt-right troll who is quite awkward, soft spoken and comes across as a shrinking coward when dealing with a real life conversation and the latter being a bumbling, hypocritical, and xenophobic cheater. Ransom meanwhile, is not only openly proud of being a jerk but he is also extremely confident and charismatic, traits that Jacob and Richard both lack. As such, some viewers found themselves disliking the rest of the Thrombeys - or at least Jacob and Richard - far more than Ransom.
• Jerkass Woobie:
  • Linda is as rude, self-centered and xenophobic as the rest of her family, but it’s hard not to feel sorry for her as she is also shown to be in deep, genuine mourning over her father (whom she was legitimately close to) and finds out that her son orchestrated Harlan’s death and that her husband had been having an affair behind her back all in the same day.
  • Walt could be considered one. Though deleted scenes reveal he's thrown in with some very bad people and risks their wrath if he doesn't pay them back, his greatest sins early in the final film are riding his father's coattails and wanting to believe the best of his son. He becomes much less sympathetic when he decides to use Marta's mother's immigration status as blackmail leverage midway through the film, but even this is brought more from desperation and fear than genuine malice.
• Love to Hate: Ransom may be a Jerkass and a psychopathic murderer, but it doesn't stop him from being entertaining, especially due to being played by Chris Evans.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • The clip of Chris Evans' foul-mouthed character Ransom Drysdale telling everyone to "Eat shit" over and over has already spread with many variations, including Captain America's "Language!", Nick Fury's "You kiss your mother with that mouth?", and a Salò crossover. Equally memetic is Walt's comeback "I will not eat one iota of shit!"
  • Fans had a field day with Ransom's clear dislike of dogs considering Evans is a well-known dog lover.
  • Ransom's impressive sweater collection has become quite the topic of fascination on the Internet, inspiring (among other things) the Knives Out Challenge on Twitter (posting a photo of yourself wearing a sweater), and the film's official Twitter account even cheekily rebranded itself to Chris Evans' Sweater Stan Account for a day.
  • Fans of the American version of The Office were quick to point out similarities with the episode "Murder," particularly Andy's hilariously bad Southern accent.
  • "It makes no damn sense. Compels me, though."^ExplanationA quote from Blanc when he explains why he agreed to take the case, which became a popular way to describe things that one might find confusing, yet compelling nonetheless.
• Moe: Marta is such a sweet person that she’s basically a precious cinnamon roll human incarnate. She can’t even think about lying to anyone or she’ll throw up! Aww...
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • If it wasn't crossed when he tried to kill Harlan and frame Marta, Ransom definitely crossed it when he murdered Fran and then tried to kill Marta after being exposed.
  • Although both Meg and Walt are given explanations for their actions against Marta (Walt in the Deleted Scenes), plenty of people think that their reasons still cannot justify crossing it by blackmailing an immigrant's daughter — whom they believe to be fully innocent anyway (and she is, after all) — with exposing her mother's undocumented status.
• Narm Charm: The accent that Daniel Craig puts on for Benoit Blanc, oh so much. Even better is that everyone around him seems to realize how ridiculous his accent is, given that it really does sound like a non-American thinking of the most stereotypical southern accent possible, upping the comedy.
  • In UK reviews the commonly held opinion was that the accent was revenge for Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins.
• Narrowed It Down to the Guy I Recognize: Granted, there is more than one famous name in the cast, but it was clear they had not brought in Chris Evans at the height of the MCU craze for a glorified cameo of a flashback.
• Nausea Fuel: Marta vomiting chunkily all over Ransom's face, and stomach liquid dripping off him in subsequent shots. Doubles as a Funny Moment.
• Shipping: Marta is usually shipped with either Ransom or Blanc. The former is more popular, but the latter has plenty of fans. (There are also those who ship her with Meg, and those who make a point of retaining her Chaste Heroine status by not shipping her with anyone at all.)
• Spiritual Successor: To Get Out (2017). A genre film that has An Aesop on how the patronizing, paternalistic brand of racism that is common in seemingly liberal-minded crowds of white people is not that different (perhaps worse in some ways) from its more violent and outwardly hateful variant. Whereas Get Out focused on the racism black Americans experience from this crowd, Knives Out focuses on the racism and xenophobia Hispanic Americans endure. Notably, both movies center in and around large homes set in an unnamed Northeast/New England suburb, and Lakeith Stanfield plays supporting roles in both (Jamie Lee Curtis' character even shouts at him to "get out" in one scene).
• Squick:
  • Richard says that Jacob was in the bathroom all night "joylessly masturbating to pictures of dead deer."
  • Marta puking in Ransom’s face when she reveals her lie about Fran’s death. Chunks and all.
• Strawman Has a Point: While it doesn't excuse her behavior, given that Linda had never been singled out for a private talk with Harlan as she's got her life very much in order, she was presumably unaware of why Harlan was getting fed up with his family and that he had been wishing they were more self-sufficient, which could make her angry reaction towards the will-reading a little less insincere and hypocritical than those of her husband, brother and sisters-in-law. Related, based upon the limited information that she has about the situation and her father's intentions, her questioning of whether Marta was sleeping with her father doesn't seem wholly unreasonable. Harlan didn't even leave anything to Fran or his own mother (though in the latter case, she might have her own money in a trust, or Harlan could simply have assumed she would predecease him).
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Most of the Thrombey-Drysdale family can apply. Despite casting several big talented names like Toni Collette, Michael Shannon and Katherine Langford, in the grand scheme of things a large portion of the family are ultimately used as background characters in the overall plot.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: Linda and Walt can become this to some viewers. While neither are exactly nice people, both are among the less awful of the Thrombeys, and are established, either in the film proper or in deleted scenes, to have some possible mitigating factors to their behavior:
  • Linda is shown to have genuinely loved her father and be grieved at his death, and so Harlan's decision to cut her out of the will can be seen as unnecessarily cruel (although it is worth noting that Linda is also clearly established as by far the most independent of the Thrombey descendants, both financially and in lifestyle, and so arguably doesn't need his inheritance to begin with), particularly as Harlan never appears to have had a chance to explain his reasoning to her.
  • Harlan's decision to cut Walt loose, meanwhile, can also be seen as unnecessarily harsh given that Walt appears to have been a decent employee of Harlan's, and Harlan never really goes into too much detail about his motives for doing so beyond giving Walt a chance to develop his own creative talents (although it's heavily implied in dialogue that Harlan had intended to explain further the next day when Walt is less intoxicated, but never gets a chance to do so due to his death). A deleted scene fleshes him out a bit, indicating that Walt has gotten into debt with criminals who caused his leg injury and, it's implied, has been embezzling from the business in order to try and keep himself afloat; his actions, while still hardly justifiable, are consequently shown to be motivated in part by fear.
  • Meg can also become this to some viewers. Joni stole money from Harlan that was meant to go to Meg's education for herself, leading Harlan to stop paying for it entirely. However, Meg was completely unaware of her mother's actions. Meg turning on Marta is also supposed to make her come off as a self-serving hypocrite, but given how she was pressured into revealing it by the rest of the family, along with how she was initially supportive of Marta getting the inheritance, several viewers took it as her being forced into doing it against her will.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: It's very easy to read Harlan as a dick who decided to screw over his own family because they didn't turn out to be the people he wanted them to be. He punishes Meg by proxy when finding out that Joni was embezzling from him, even though Meg was attending college and had no incentive to screw over her grandfather. Likewise, he cuts off Linda and doesn't even leave a coded message or explanation why. What hammers it home is that Marta emphasizes she doesn't want the money, she wants to stay out of trouble, and he knew it would be hard for her when the family found out.
• The Un-Twist: Ransom being the killer really shouldn't be surprising given all the early signs portraying him as a self-absorbed asshole. Genre-savvy viewers might suspect this to be an obvious Red Herring and be thrown for a loop by his apparent friendliness with Marta but it's all a ploy so he can more directly screw her over and he really is exactly as bad as he appeared.
• The Woobie:
  • Marta Cabrera. She's the nicest, most altruistic character in the movie, but unfortunately, she suffers a Trauma Conga Line that leaves her emotionally distressed. She breaks down in guilt upon suspecting that she accidentally killed Harlan, witnesses Harlan commit suicide right in front of her, gets unfairly chastised by the other Thrombeys all the time, is manipulated into being threatened with deportation along with her sister and mother, and gets dragged down further by Ransom as he frames her for Harlan's death and baits her into helping him get away with it. And to top it all off, Ransom tries to kill her when his plan doesn't work.
  • Nana comes in at a close second. Her grandchildren and great-grandchildren are so wrapped up themselves that none of them comforts her about the loss of her son. What makes it even more of a Tear Jerker is that Nana herself remains largely silent about it, like she's trying to cope with it alone, or she's struggling to come to terms with it. The cops at least don't make her leave the house when Benoit asks them to clear up the family, implying that Marta will look out for her.
  • Fran the housekeeper also deserves a mention. She is the one who first finds Harlan's body and is clearly unnerved by it, especially when it comes to light that she realized that Ransom was the guilty party the whole time. She tried to confront him about it, but he injected her with lethal amounts of morphine.
  • Meg is the only one who appears to be genuinely nice to Marta as a person, instead of the others that treat her more like a pet. She finds out after losing her grandfather that her mother is broke, has been embezzling from Harlan, and as a result, she will not be able to afford to continue going to school. When Marta is revealed to be the heir, she is pressured by her family to betray Marta, first by trying to convince her to give up the inheritance, and then by being pressured herself to give up the secret that Marta's mother is an illegal immigrant so they can use it to blackmail Marta. Fortunately, when she confesses to Marta, she is forgiven.
• Win Back the Crowd: For some members of a certain franchise's crowd, Knives Out is seen as proof that Rian Johnson's work on The Last Jedi wasn't emblematic of his abilities as a director or writer. Knives Out in general is seen as much less divisive and aggravating, especially since he's writing his own characters rather than working in a pre-established franchise. That it's a completely different genre (and one where the subversion of tropes is more commonly accepted at that, if not expected) also helps.

---