Film / Knives Out

"I have eliminated no suspects." ^note From left to right: Richard, Jacob, Walt, Meg, Ransom, Benoit Blanc, Harlan (in chair), Det. Lt. Elliot, Linda, Joni, and Marta.

"That fateful night seems at first glance to fill that hole perfectly. A doughnut hole in the doughnut's hole. But we must look a little closer. And when we do, we see that the doughnut hole has a hole in its center — it is not a doughnut hole at all, but a smaller doughnut with its own hole, and our doughnut is not whole at all!"

— Benoit Blanc

Knives Out is a 2019 murder mystery comedy film directed and written by Rian Johnson.

Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer), a bestselling mystery author and patriarch of the wealthy Thrombey family, dies on his birthday by what looks like suicide. In the aftermath, three detectives — Lt. Elliot (Lakeith Stanfield), Trooper Wagner (Noah Segan), and renowned Gentleman Detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) – come to investigate the scene. But this will not be such a simple investigation – Harlan altered his will recently, and the Thrombeys are a Big, Screwed-Up Family with multiple motives between them...

A modern take on the whodunnit murder mystery genre, the star-studded cast also includes Ana de Armas as Harlan's nurse Marta, Jamie Lee Curtis and Michael Shannon as Harlan's children, Don Johnson, Toni Collette, and Riki Lindhome as Harlan's children-in-law, Chris Evans, Katherine Langford, and Jaeden Martell as Harlan's grandchildren, and Frank Oz as the family's lawyer.

The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 7, 2019, and its wide release in North America followed on November 27. Shortly thereafter, Netflix acquired the rights to produce two sequels. The standalone sequel, Glass Onion, was theatrically released in the United States for one week in November 2022 before a worldwide Netflix release in December of that year.

Like most of Johnson's prior movies, the director's commentary was released while the film was still in theaters. Start it when the Lionsgate logo appears to listen along.

Tropers beware! Many of the trope names themselves are spoilers, so if you want to avoid them it's highly recommended you watch the film first.

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Knives Out contains examples of:

A to H

• Accidental Murder: Subverted. It seems at first that Marta accidentally gave Harlan a lethal overdose of morphine, causing the man to hatch a complicated scheme to clear her name of murder, ending in Harlan slitting his own throat. We later discover that Ransom switched the liquids in Marta's medicine bottles, meaning she gave Harlan the proper medication, and only thought she had made a mistake because she was so good at her job that she instinctively could tell which bottle had the right medicine in it without looking at the labels.
• Actor Allusion: Toni Collette's Joni, an (implied) nouveau riche ditzy Coattail-Riding Relative with No Indoor Voice and flamboyant mannerism, is very similar to her role as Mandy Slade in Velvet Goldmine.
• Actually Pretty Funny:
  • Harlan playfully flips the Go board when Marta starts beating him and claims that her not going easy on him is elder abuse. Marta cannot stop giggling as she calls him a Sore Loser.
  • When Ransom quips that Benoit Blanc is straight out of "CSI: KFC", Lt. Elliot snorts with amusement. Blanc himself is less impressed.
  • When Marta hands Blanc the toxicology report, she comments, "You're not much of a detective." Blanc replies, "Well, to be fair, you make a pretty lousy murderer." This gets a chuckle out of Marta.
• The Alleged Car: Downplayed. Marta's car drives, but as she and Ransom discover, it is woefully unsuited for a police chase (she can barely get it to go 60 miles per hour while flooring it!).
  Marta: Do you regret helping me yet?
  Ransom: Well, I regret not taking the Beemer.
• All for Nothing:
  • Played with in the case of Marta and Blanc. Blanc saw the bloodstain on Marta's shoe and suspected her as soon as they met, making the efforts to cover up the crime pointless. However, he did think she was somewhat involved until figuring out that Harlan actually did commit suicide.
  • To a lesser extent, Ransom's plan failed the minute the toxicology reports were done. Harlan did not have a morphine overdose, which was why the police were not taking the case seriously at first. Destroying the evidence of the report only created a window of ambiguity which leaves Marta's innocence in question.
• All in the Eyes: During Meg's phone call with Marta after the will reading, Meg is standing in a darkened room with a bar of light falling across her eyes. This coincides with the revelation that Meg has chosen to join her selfish relatives in screwing Marta over, abandoning their former friendship.
• Ambiguous Ending: The movie ends with Ransom being hauled off to prison while Marta stands on the balcony of Thrombey Manor, drinking from Harlan's mug and looking down on his family. It leaves it vague exactly what Marta plans to do with Harlan's inheritance, will she share it with his family or not give them a dime like Harlan intended? The important thing, though, is that it is up to her.
• Ambiguous Syntax: Blanc's request to the Thrombeys to stay at the mansion until he officially completes the investigation has this form.
  Joni: Can we ask why? Has something changed?
  Blanc: No.
  Joni: "No, it hasn't changed"? Or "no, we can't ask"?
• Arc Words: "In for a penny, in for a pound."
• Artistic License – Law:
  • Alan Stevens, the family attorney, insists that Harlan's will is airtight and can only be overturned by Marta being convicted of causing Harlan's death, but the film takes place in Massachusetts, which actually has laws to the contrary:
    • The fact that Harlan appears to have simply drawn up the will himself and given it to his lawyer in a sealed envelope means it was not properly witnessed and could be easily challenged in court. Massachusetts doesn't recognize holographic wills^note Some states accept a holographic will (i.e., entirely handwritten by the deceased). as legitimate, which means that if his new will was unwitnessed, his old will would stand unless he revoked or destroyed it, and even if he did, then the state would act as if he had no will.
  • A slayer statute just means the slayer cannot inherit. It does not negate a will or bring a defunct one back. Ransom figured he could get around being disinherited by framing Marta for his crime and using the slayer statute against her. He assumed this would bring Harlan's previous will back or get him something in intestacy.^note That's property not given to someone or something in a will, resulting in the court deciding where it goes. However, even if it had worked and negated the will, then the state would treat it as if Harlan had no will. Under Massachusetts intestacy law, the assets would pass to Harlan's children: Linda, Walt and Meg (daughter of his deceased son, Neil) who were on board with his disinheritance anyway.
  • Alan lampshades a common bit of legal artistic license when he notes that it is not, in fact, necessary for the entire family to be read the will at the same time, but it was more convenient this time since they were all in the area at the same time anyway
• Artistic License – Law Enforcement: Lieutenant Eliot and Trooper Hanlon would not have let Ransom continue monologuing after he'd already confessed to attempted murder, arson, etc. They would have immediately placed him under arrest and cuffed him. Even if they hadn't, Ransom would not have been allowed to get between them and Marta, as he was clearly furious with her. Also, when he attacked Marta way too much time passed while Ransom held her down and then learned the knife was a prop. Not knowing that, Eliot and Hanlon would have immediately worked together to pull Ransom off her while trying to prevent him from pulling the supposedly real knive out, in order to prevent further blood loss while they stabilized her and called for an ambulance. If they didn't know the knife wasn't real, they would have been justified in shooting Ransom then to keep him from pulling the knife out.
  • If Richard was actually trying to bribe the police with a fistful of cash when Ransom was being taken away in handcuffs, in Real Life he himself would have been arrested on the spot.
  • When Marta tries to call 911, it rings once before Harlan pushes the button to disconnect the call. While the 911 dispatcher did not answer the call, it nevertheless would have been recorded and the dispatcher would have treated the number the same way as if a dispatcher had answered and had the person on the other end hang up without saying anything. The dispatcher would have either called back to determine what the situation was, or dispatched police to Harlan's house to do the same. Also, a 911 call at approximately the same time as Harlan's death would have changed the entire tone of the investigation, with the police being much more interrogative and aggressive in their investigation.
• Artistic License – Medicine:
  • Characters often mention Marta as being an excellent nurse yet not following basic procedures of medication safety, namely checking to make sure she is drawing up the right medication. She also does not check her bag to confirm the naloxone (antidote) is present before giving the morphine (though Ransom actually stole the naloxone that day.)
  • In the event of the naloxone being unavailable, 15 minutes is not that long to perform CPR. Had Marta called an ambulance and roused some of the other family members to give her a hand, there's a reasonable chance that Harlan could've survived.
• Artistic License – Pharmacology:
  • Marta mentions that Harlan's current regimen includes doses of 100 milligrams of ketorolac for the pain from a recent shoulder injury. Ketorolac often acts as a short-term painkiller, yes, but always given in lower doses (usually 15 to 30 milligrams).
  • A large dose of morphine will have noticeable effects long before the ten-minute mark. Ultimately subverted in that Harlan received the correct dose, and ended up displaying none of the described symptoms, immediate or eventual.
  • The morphine vial clearly shows a 5 mg per 1 mL concentration on the label. If what Marta said is true and Harlan accidentally received 100 mg, she would have to draw up 20 mL to equal that dose: more than can be contained in the 10 mL syringe she is wielding, and and extremely clear as a wrong dose. The ketorolac vial also clearly shows a concentration of 30 mg per one mL. If Harlan's typical ketorolac dose is 100 mg (as Marta mentions later), this would be 3.33 mL- and only 16.67 mg of morphine if she drew up the same amount of liquid. While 16.67 mg can certainly be a deadly amount of morphine for a person with no opiate tolerance, it is not that close to the seriously lethal 100 mg claimed in the film.
• Ascended Fridge Horror: Fran and Marta have always been friends, smoking marijuana and enjoying each other's company off the clock. During The Summation, Marta is horrified when she realizes that a dying Fran wasn't accusing her of murdering Harlan, but rather "Hugh" aka Ransom. She then remembers that Ransom is an asshole and she trusted him for most of the movie. Her realization is partly Played for Laughs, but she also becomes saddened that Fran never hated her and mad at herself for enabling Harlan and Fran's killer.
• Audible Sharpness: The knife makes a loud *zing* sound when used. (Specifically, Harlan slitting his throat with it.)
• Awesomeness by Analysis: An interesting case where it works against the relevant party; while Marta believed that she mixed up Harlan's medication, the later toxicology analysis confirms that Marta gave him the correct medication despite the mixed-up labels, Blanc attributing that to Marta's skill as a nurse making her aware on a subconscious level of the minute differences between the two substances despite the labels.
• Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other:
  • Linda, for all her arguments with Walt, defends him to the police and argues that he would not have killed their father. She also refuses to take the bait by their questions about his abilities or running of the business. Later they both hug and admit they are grieving their father.
  • Despite Ransom being estranged from his parents, Richard desperately tries to bribe the cops when it's revealed that Ransom was the murderer and is being arrested. It is no good and does not help his case, but he does care.
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • Marta's flashback starts with her being cross with Harlan, sniping at him to take his meds so she can go home, causing the audience to expect that this will be another flashback establishing the motive of a murder suspect. However, this settles into a friendly rapport, taking Marta off the table. This too turns out to be a bait and switch, and so does the film's entire premise as a whodunnit, when it turns out Marta did indeed kill Harlan — entirely by accident. The end of the film reveals a further bait-and-switch when it turns out that Ransom switched the labels on Harlan's medication as part of his plan to frame Marta.
  • At one point, we see an ominous close-up of a spot of blood on Marta's shoe which is used to imply that this will be somehow used by the Thrombeys to threaten or expose her. In fact, the next time it appears is at the end, when the truth has already come out — when Blanc reveals that he knew all along that she was involved somehow, since he noticed the spot of blood the very first time they met.
  • This exchange between Blanc and Lt. Elliot at the beginning:
    Blanc: I'm here because this morning someone dodged a very important question.
    Lt. Elliot: Who?
    Blanc: Me. Linda asked who hired me. [...] I do not know.
• Big Fancy House:
  • The large Thrombey manor, complete with a trick window and kitsch items on every corner. Detective Elliot calls it a real-life Clue board. The family takes pride in their (as they call it) "ancestral" home, even though Harlan simply bought it from a realtor in the '80s.
  • What we see of Ransom's house is a sleeker, more modern take on this trope, with nice furnishings and natural light coming from floor-to-ceiling glass windows.
• Big Friendly Dog: A minor plot point. Harlan's two German Shepards absolutely adore Marta, constantly bring her things to play fetch with, and never bark at her. Blanc, watching them gleefully greet Marta, observes that dogs are excellent judges of character. Averted with Ransom, as they clearly don't like him and bark every time they see him...
• Big "NO!": Blanc does one in silent slow motion when Ransom stabs Marta. Subverted as it turns out to be a harmless stage dagger.
• Bilingual Bonus: Ana de Armas is Cuban, but Marta and her family deliberately speak in a standardized, non-regional Spanish that preserves the mystery of where they are from.
• Bittersweet Ending: Ransom is arrested, Marta is proven innocent of overdosing Harlan and the family is forced to accept that they have been disinherited. Even so, Harlan and Fran are dead, which has clearly shaken Marta since they were her friends. Linda gets an extra gut-punch on learning her husband was cheating on her as the police lead her son into their car. Meanwhile, the Thrombeys' future is uncertain since they threatened Marta.
• Blackmail Backfire:
  • After the will reading, and the revelation that Harlan left everything to Marta, Walt tries to get Marta to renounce the inheritance by threatening to reveal her mother's status to the authorities. He blows it by offering the carrot that if she co-operates the family has the resources to hire good lawyers to resolve her mother's situation, which leads her to realize that if she keeps the inheritance she'll have the resources to do the same without their help.
  • Fran, having known Ransom was the culprit all along, tries to blackmail him. He instead gives her a morphine overdose then tries to frame Marta up for this murder, too.
• Blatant Lies:
  • Blanc interrogates the Thrombey family members about confrontations they were each heard having with Harlan shortly before his death, for which they give transparently bad answers while the flashbacks show the truth. Blanc's line of questioning Marta afterwards shows that he has seen through each lie completely.
  • Also, as a Establishing Character Moment for Richard. Richard speaks at length about his respect for immigrants who "follow the rules" of immigration, citing Marta as an example. He then hands his empty dinner plate to Marta without saying a word, expecting her to take it as a maid would. Marta is a nurse, not a maid, Richard just doesn't care enough to know the difference.
• Book Ends: The movie begins and ends with a close-up of a "My House, My Rules, My Coffee" coffee mug. At the end, Marta holds the mug to the camera with only the words "My House" exposed.
• Bourgeois Bohemian: Meg and Joni are wealthy liberals and are the kindest and least racist members of the family initially, but they are far from perfect. Joni runs a snake oil scheme that targets other liberals and has been swindling Harlan to double-dip on Meg's tuition. Meg studies social justice issues at an elite university but does not live up to the ideals of what she studies. Once their inheritance and material privilege is threatened they pull an Enemy Mine with the conservative members of the family — though Meg is indicated to have a My God, What Have I Done? moment immediately afterwards and tearfully apologizes to Marta. The narrative leaves whether she is just a good actor or genuinely regrets up in the air, but hints at the latter.
• Brick Joke:
  • Harlan mentions that Ransom "plays life like a game, until he can't tell the difference between a prop knife and a real one." When Ransom tries to stab Marta, he unknowingly uses a prop knife rather than a real one.
  • In the first scene, we see Fran bring Harlan his coffee in a mug labeled "My house, my rules, my coffee." The last shot of the movie is Marta drinking from the same mug while looking down at Harlan's family from the balcony of Harlan's house, which he had just left to her.
  • When Linda finally deciphers her father's note detailing Richard's affair, she stares at him in hurt disbelief. In the next scene, he has the beginnings of a black eye. Also, in her introduction, she says they had special ways of communicating that could be hard to figure out; it apparently includes disappearing ink.
  • A very subtle Visual Pun: the knife display looks like a huge ring of knives with a space in the center. Blanc at one point compares the case to a doughnut, saying they both have holes in them. At one point during The Summation, the camera shows Blanc sitting in the chair in front of the knife display, with his head in the empty space. In other words, Blanc has filled the hole.
    • A double version occurs with the "doughnut inside of a doughnut" line of thought from Blanc. Blanc is not the doughnut hole (being able to solve everything) but the doughnut inside of a doughnut hole (not knowing why someone hired him) until the summation becomes the doughnut hole that fills the doughnut at last (revealing both who hired him and why). For more visual effect, Blanc's summation speech does not truly start until the knife display frames him in its center.
• The Butler Did It: Played with to hell and back. Marta, Harlan's nurse, believes she accidentally killed him, but she's the protagonist and the film initially follows her trying to cover up the crime. Then it turned out she did not kill him, but Ransom had set her up to kill him.
• The Cameo: Marta's sister Alice watches a cop show featuring the voice of frequent Rian Johnson collaborator Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
• Cannot Tell a Lie: Lying makes Marta feel so guilty that she can only go for a minute or two at the max without throwing up because it makes her feel so bad.
• Cast Full of Rich People: The suspects are the rich Thrombeys, and their petty infighting drives much of the goings-on.
• Casting Gag:
  • Daniel Craig also played an investigator who at least partially investigated Christopher Plummer, who hired him, for the murder of a family member in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011). (In that film, Plummer's character mentions how the person who hires the investigator is automatically a possible suspect; in this film, the murderer was the one who hired Blanc.)
  • Ransom is the only Thrombey member Harlan's dogs bark at, which they only do to those they consider strangers; given his Establishing Character Moment and that he has estranged from the rest of the family, the movie also implies that he does not treat them well either. Chris Evans however is a well-known dog lover.
  • Jaeden Martell, who plays the most outwardly racist and white supremacist member of the Thrombey family, is 1/4 Korean.
• Casual Danger Dialog: Harlan. When Marta first realizes she accidentally gave him thirty times the recommended morphine dose, he jots down symptoms of an overdose to use as a murder for a future book. Then calmly relays instructions to her so the police will not charge her for murder. Both the "casual" and the "dialogue" parts are foreshadowing: he's calm because he wasn't actually dying, and his musing about how this could be a potential way to kill someone were right on the money — Ransom had set Marta up to kill Harlan by previously switching the medicine.
• Catapult Nightmare: The movie introduces Marta waking this way from a bad dream one week after Harlan's death.
• Central Theme: People get what's coming to them, be they good or bad.
  • Marta Cabrera is the example of goodness being rewarded. Marta had been such a good friend to Harlan that she becomes the sole inheritor of his entire estate. And while she spends most of the film thinking she accidentally killed Harlan, her good nature makes it very difficult for her to cover it up, even when it's for her mother's sake. She learns, though, that she did not put Harlan in any danger at all, relieving her of some guilt. Furthermore, after learning what truly happened, Marta's decision to get help for a dying Fran, who she believed to be hatefully blackmailing her and was expected to abandon to die, pays off—it allows Marta to lie about Fran's survival so Ransom will confess to her murder, bringing the killer to justice while securing her inheritance. She suffers a lot, but Marta's good nature gets her everything in the end because she decided to act based on her morals over self-preservation.
  • The Thrombeys as a unit display bad karma coming around, as, after disappointing their patriarch thoroughly as people, they lose their inheritance entirely to the immigrant nurse they disliked and mistreated based on her ethnicity and class. At the end of the film, their abuse of Marta leaves them entirely at her mercy as to whether they can regain any of their former assets.
  • Richard Drysdale is used for a microcosm of bad karma. He throws Harlan's baseball spitefully out of the window of his study, and over the course of the film, that ball eventualy ends up in the hands of his wife Linda, who returns the ball to the study where she finds Harlan's secret letter disclosing Richard's affair to her. His cheating is exposed in the end as a direct result of mistreating his father-in-law's possessions, earning Richard a black eye and likely an impending divorce.
  • Lastly is Ransom, whose attempted murder and successful murder are discovered and condemned after his manipulations were broken down by Marta's good nature.
• Chekhov's Gag: While furnishing her alibi in Harlan's death, Marta is apparently caught when she and Nana see each other through a window. After a tense moment of silence, Mood Whiplash ensues when Nana says, "Ransom, are you back again already?" Marta thinks she is in the clear, but the specific wording — "back again" — gives Blanc a vital clue to unraveling the mystery.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • Benoit Blanc's profile in The New Yorker initially just contrasts Linda (who read it) and Joni (who read a tweet about it). It turns out to have been the reason Ransom knew to hire him after Harlan's "suicide" made the news: he had read it too.
  • In a flashback, Harlan mentions during his Go game with Marta that Ransom "plays life like a game, until he can't tell the difference between a prop knife and a real one." At the end, Ransom grabs a knife from the decorative display to try and stab Marta, but it turns out to be a prop knife.
  • The drawer in which Fran keeps her secret stash of drugs, later containing the toxicology report that proves Marta didn't give Harlan a fatally wrong dose of medicine. As Meg puts it, "Who would open a clock?"
  • During the opening questioning scenes, the police officers pointedly show that they are recording the suspects on a cell phone. When Marta receives news of Fran's death, she uses this fact to get Ransom to admit guilt instead so the recording would catch it.
  • The letter Harlan threatened to present to Linda when confronting Richard over the affair he was having. Richard opens the letter after Harlan's death to discover it blank and leaves it on the desk in relief. At the end of the film, Linda discovers it and, having earlier discussed the games she had learned to use to communicate with her father, uses a lighter to decipher its secret message revealing Richard's adultery.
    • Related, at one point we see Linda fondly holding a stack of letters from her father on the same letterhead. Close inspection shows they're suffering from light burns and thermal damage from the lighter activating the ink.
    • Also related to the above two points, Harlan has lemons on his desk. Lemon juice works as a heat-activated invisible ink.
    • Richard, angry over being duped, throws the vintage baseball on Harlan's desk out a nearby open window. Johnson points out in the in-theater commentary track that it is this small act of pettiness that undoes him, as Linda finds the ball and puts it back—thus giving her reason to enter Harlan's study and find the note.
  • At one point, the camera focuses on a tiny spot of blood on Marta's sneaker, in a way that suggests that this will come back to bite her. At the end, Benoit Blanc admits that he suspected Marta had some involvement in events from pretty much the first moment he met her ... because he noticed that spot of blood.
  • When Blanc meets Marta for the first time and sits across from her, he glances down as he sets his feet. This is where he saw the blood on Marta's shoe.
  • The fact that Ransom makes the hired help address him by his first name "Hugh". When Fran is found drugged, she apparently snarls "You did this!" but only later does Marta realize she was saying "Hugh did this!"
  • The torn-off toxicology report. The bottom of the page originally had a meeting time and place written on it. Ransom tore it off and sent Marta an email with a later meeting time so that he could get there first, kill Fran, and frame Marta for it.
  • During his introduction, Wagner apologizes that he will be recording all their conversations with his phone because it makes it easier to keep track of things. At the end Ransom suggests that he'll be able to deny he confessed to everything, Wagner reveals that he was recording Blanc's summation and Ransom's reaction to it.
• Chekhov's Gunman:
  • The other characters dismiss Nana as a Scatterbrained Senior, with a dismissive remark from one of her grandchildren saying that no one has any idea how old she is. Although without malice, even Marta doesn't think much of her asking if Ransom has come back again, thinking this is just her senility at play. Blanc knows that Nana understands more than people think, and she becomes instrumental in piecing together everything that happened, as well as finding evidence that Ransom was more heavily involved than he seems. Meg and Fran also give vital bits of information that move the story along.
  • Fran's cousin at the medical examiner's office is an example of this who is also The Ghost. She only appears in a throwaway line but obtains the crucial bit of evidence that sets up the last act.
• Chekhov's Hobby:
  • Ransom has some knowledge of criminal procedure from a summer he spent working as Harlan's research assistant, which helps him realize the significance of the toxicology report and how it could compromise his plans.
  • Linda states during the first interview that she and her father Harlan made communication something of a game to solve. Her husband finds the letter that Harlan was going to give her that showed that he was cheating on Linda, but sees that it is apparently blank and assumes Harlan never wrote it. At the end, Linda finds the paper and realizing it was another note from her dad holds a lighter under the letter to make the invisible ink reveal itself, revealing to her the affair.
• Chekhov's Party: Harlan Thrombey dies under suspicious circumstances shortly after his 85th birthday party. As private detective Benoit Blanc investigates, he asks Harlan's family to recollect the gathering and learns Harlan had confrontations before the party started that may have inspired various suspects to murder him; but in flashbacks we see that one argument during the party was the one that began a chain of events leading to his death.
• Chekhov's Skill:
  • Blanc deduces that Marta did not kill Harlan, even accidentally, due to how skilled she is as a nurse. With her knowledge of a medicine's viscosity and all, Ransom switching the labels did not even matter in the end.
  • Not a voluntary trait per se, but Marta's condition of vomiting whenever she tells a lie. She gets a phone call from the hospital Fran was admitted to and declares that she's alive, prompting Ransom to angrily confess to her attempted murder, confident that he can beat the charge with his money. Marta then stops holding back and vomits all over him, revealing that she was lying, that Fran is dead, and Ransom has just confessed to first-degree murder on recording.
  • During the first questioning scenes, Walt said of Harlan, "the plots just popped into his head fully formed." Once he thought he took an overdose of morphine, Harlan spun an elaborate plot on the fly to help clear Marta.
  • An exasperated Harlan laments that Marta is the only person who can beat him at Go. She explains that it is because she does not play to beat him, but to make "a beautiful pattern". Marta "wins" at the end of the movie, solely inheriting Harlan's fortune, and she does it by always trying to do the most moral thing she can, rather than trying to screw over other people.
• Clean Pretty Reliable: Zigzagged. Marta, who is a trained nurse, rapidly performs chest compressions on an OD's Fran to revive her after calling an ambulance. We find out later that despite her efforts, Fran died in the hospital.
• Cluster F-Bomb: Ransom drops a fairly subdued (but hilarious) one into a family argument, pointing out one relative after another.^note It was originally scripted as a straight-up cluster F-bomb, but Rian Johnson decided to tone it down after realizing it would be enough alone to bump the film up to an R rating.
  Ransom: Eat shit; eat shit; definitely eat shit...
• Coattail-Riding Relative: The Thrombeys... all of them... well, d'uh.
• Comical Coffee Cup: Harlan has one saying "My House, My Rules, My Coffee" in his first scene, firmly establishing who he is. When the family asks if the house is still theirs, Marta shows up drinking from the same cup, with her hands covering everything except "My House".
• Comically Missing the Point:
  • During The Summation, Blanc says that although what has happened was a tragic mischance, there was one person who acted with deliberate malice throughout; he pauses dramatically, and then calls, "Trooper Wagner!" Marta briefly thinks he is saying Wagner was the malicious agent, before realizing that Blanc has called for Wagner to escort that person into the room.
  • Trooper Wagner, a huge pop culture fan, spends his time thrilled to work a case related to the celebrated crime novelist Harlan Thrombey, rather than the fact that the case revolves around the suicide and suspected murder of an eighty-five-year-old man.
• Complexity Addiction:
  • Harlan's Fatal Flaw, in a way. If he had allowed Marta to call 911 instead of immediately concocting a detailed cover-up, it would have been discovered that she hadn't accidentally overdosed him after all.
    • Had he not gone for the dramatic reveals for his will, everyone would have at least understood his plans.
  • Benoit Blanc, also. At the end, he reveals he had his suspicions about Marta since he first saw her (due to a tiny blood spatter on her shoe), but he's so wrapped up in getting to the bottom of who hired him that he does not immediately confront her, instead using her to ferret out that secret while also proving her innocence. It ends up being the right call, since the person who hired him was trying to frame Marta.
  • And Ransom. If he hadn't paid Benoit to investigate Harlan's "murder", the cops would have ruled it a suicide. The family would have contested the will regardless, which may or may not have worked depending on whether Harlan followed the formalities.
• Condescending Compassion: The family treats Marta very patronizingly if they bother to treat her nicely at all. They all promise that she is part of the family and that they will take care of her after Harlan's death. The thin veneer comes off when it's revealed Harlan has left all his assets to her. When Marta makes an exact promise to Meg, they do not take it well.
• Cool Car: Ransom's 1972 BMW 3.0 CSi.
• "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot: As Benoit Blanc points out near the end of the film, the murder mystery never would have happened if Harlan had just listened to Marta and waited for an ambulance. But no, he had to be dramatic...
• Decon-Recon Switch: The movie at first seems to be a deconstruction of the whodunnit as we find out thirty minutes in that Marta (accidentally) caused Harlan's death and most of the movie is her trying to cover up her tracks from Detective Blanc, who seems like a bit of a doofus. But then it's reconstructed when there was a murder attempt on Harlan that Marta unwittingly foiled while thinking she caused his death, and Blanc combines all the pieces in a final summation that indicts the true perpetrator, Ransom.
• Decoy Protagonist: The film's marketing mostly focuses on the higher-profile actors like Chris Evans and Jamie Lee Curtis, and Benoit Blanc is the lead at first. However, following a flashback it becomes clear that Marta is the movie's protagonist and emotional center. Blanc is a hero, though perhaps not the hero.
• Destroy the Evidence:
  • When Marta realizes that Blanc is close to uncovering that she returned to the house after leaving it on the night that Harlan died, she starts to use her role as The Watson to deliberately compromise the evidence, such as trampling over her own footprints and using a magnet to wipe the video tape showing her car pulling off the road.
  • Ransom destroys the crime lab and what he thinks is the only copy of the toxicology report in an attempt to put the Evil Plan back on course.
• Detectives Follow Footprints: When exploring the estate and coming up the back path, Trooper Wagner notes how muddy his boots will be after this. Blanc then realizes it has not rained in the week since Harlan's death, meaning these are good prints. He and the other officers look to seal off the area. It is defied when Marta, recognizing the same issue about ten seconds sooner, pulls further ahead to walk over her prints and then "mishears" the officers when they tell her to stop, purposely trampling over footprints on the way back to contaminate the crime scene and rendering them useless. To add insult to injury, the dogs run through that path.
• Detective Mole: An instance where it is not the main detective leading the investigation, but The Watson. Blanc enlists the help of Marta to aid in his investigation, all the while she was under the impression that she was the murderer and works to muddle the clues every step of the way. In this instance the trope is also played with, in that Blanc suspected her all along and chose her as Watson because of it.
• Devil in Plain Sight: Ransom, the most unpleasant, the most arrogant, the most distant, the most ambitious, and the most verbally abusive of the family, the bitterest about losing the fortune, AND the one who has had the most erratic, unexplainable movement during the party (such as leaving and reappearing at random times) is, in fact, the true killer.
• Didn't See That Coming: Walt tries to manipulate Marta into giving them the inheritance instead of keeping it for herself by saying they can use the family's vast wealth, resources, and top-tier lawyers to keep her mother from being deported for being an illegal alien. Marta quite reasonably points out that all the wealth, resources, and top-tier lawyers are hers now. Her insight and perception took Walt completely by surprise. His stunned and dismayed expression at how quickly she realized that makes him realize Marta is sweet and innocent, but she's not naive.
• Didn't Think This Through:
  • Someone hired Benoit Blanc to investigate Harlan's death. Ransom assumed that the man would implicate Marta on charges of manslaughter. Benoit instead took his time to solve the case because he suspected the ulterior motive and eventually came to the truth. Why would a killer hire a professional detective again?
  • Fran the housekeeper. Bless her heart, but she really should have known better than trying to blackmail Ransom after realizing that he attempted to kill Harlan and framed Marta for the act, then arranged to meet with him in a dark, secluded laundry alone to discuss their terms despite knowing that the man will go to any length to achieve his goal instead of doing the sensible thing and telling the police (or really, anyone else) about it. Unsurprisingly, it gets her killed, and if Marta wasn't kind enough to try to resuscitate her so that she could last long enough to arrive at a hospital, her premature death would play right into Ransom's plan to implicate Marta and he would've gotten away with it all, the very thing she was trying to prevent.
• Died in Ignorance: Plays a significant role in the film. Harlan killed himself believing he was going to die in minutes from Marta accidentally poisoning him with a morphine overdose, to ensure she would not be the one murdering him, and therefore could still receive his inheritance. However, it is later revealed Ransom switched the bottles and took the antidote, meaning Marta really would have given Harlan the lethal dose of morphine had she read the labels. However, the bottles drop, and Marta, being an experienced nurse for Harlan, is able to subconsciously recognise the density of the correct medication without reading the label, only believing she had given him morphine when she read it. Unbeknowst to him, Harlan was not on the brink of death and would be alive and well had he not believed he was, rendering his death a Senseless Sacrifice.
• Died on Their Birthday: Harlan Thrombey dies on the night of his 85th birthday with his throat slit. The police rule it a suicide, but private detective Benoit Blanc is anonymously hired to investigate, setting the rest of the movie's plot into motion.
• Disappointed by the Motive: Just after he and Wagner have interrogated the relatives, Elliot expresses this opinion. He cannot think why any of Harlan's relatives would kill him for any reason besides just to make money. (Walt and Joni, the only two with ideas anyone can say go 'deeper', wanted respectively to rent the intellectual property rights to filmmakers and to secure more money for Meg's college tuition.)
• Dodge by Braking: Knowing that her shitty car is no match for the police cruisers Marta brakes suddenly, making them overshoot her while she turns into an exit. She does it again by braking and turning into an alleyway where the cruiser turns too wide to follow. Both attempts only work temporarily, as the cruisers catch up to her quickly afterwards.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: Ransom has an extremely strained relationship with his family. Yet at the end of the day, what really propelled him to frame Marta for murder is resenting the thought of an outsider like her inheriting property that he perceives to be theirs, and their birthright. Blanc even brings up that Harlan bought the house from a Pakistani billionaire in the 1980s. Lampshaded by Richard's rant against immigrants threatening their culture and way of life. Made even more glaring by the fact that an actor best known for playing the personification of American values plays Ransom, who here is denouncing a Latin woman getting what he sees as his birthright.
• The Dog Bites Back: Harlan's kids and grandkids, if not Harlan himself, see Marta as a weak-willed servant whom they can dominate in one form or another. She shows she has bite in her at three moments.
  • First, when Walt is blackmailing Marta and she musters enough courage to rub the fact that she's inherited his father's resources in his face. So, she does not need the family.
  • When confronting the antagonist, she lied to his face to get him to confess to his crimes. Then she purposely vomits all over Ransom.
  • The final one is observing the Thrombeys from the terrace on Harlan's house, quietly drinking from the "My House..." mug. They are without Harlan's money or property and she is letting them know she controls their fate henceforth.
  • Marta isn't the only one abused by the Thrombeys. Great-Nana, Harlan's mother, is completely ignored and treated rudely by her relatives, to the point where they stick her by the front door like a coat rack during her son's birthday party. However, Nana's eyewitness testimony regarding Ransom returning to the house turns out to be the final piece of the puzzle, and it's implied that part of the reason she told Blanc about it was to get back at her ungrateful grandchildren and great-grandchildren for their cruelty. In a bit of symbolism, when Blanc delivers a blistering speech to the Thrombeys, they all act shocked except Nana, who chuckles instead: she quite literally gets the last laugh.
• The Dog Was the Mastermind: Briefly parodied and subverted when Marta misunderstands Blanc, thinking he's naming Trooper Wagner as the real killer when he's simply calling Wagner into the room.
• Dramatically Delayed Drug: Initially appeared to be what would happen to Harlan, in that he received a lethal overdose of morphine but did not show any symptoms for a few minutes, but is Defied realistically in that he never received the morphine and his death was purely an Accidental Suicide.
• Dramatic Drop: Played with when Fran discovers Harlan's corpse at the beginning. The breakfast tray she is bringing him starts to slip out of her hands, but she fumblingly stops it falling all the way to the floor. Becomes a Chekhov's Gag at the end, when Marta uses the same cup that wasn't smashed to assert her dominance over the family.
• Dramatic High Perching: At the end, Marta stands on the balcony of Harlan's house, which is now hers, looking at the Thrombeys as they watch Ransom being taken in custody, and they look back at her in utter defeat as they can't do anything to prevent her from inheriting Harlan's wealth. It gives her an air of victory, especially as she drinks from Harlan's mug while covering the last four words on it with her hand, only leaving "My house".
• Dramatic Irony: In one flashback Richard remarks that he is fine with "good" immigrants who come into the country legally, like Marta's family. But the audience knows that her mother is The Illegal, and shit hits the fan when the rest of the Thrombeys find out.
• Driven to Suicide: Harlan Thrombey, apparently. And in actuality as well. However, the circumstances that resulted in his suicide are much, much more complicated than they appear, eventually Heroic (if Senseless) Sacrifice.
• Driving Question: Not who killed Harlan Thrombey, we are shown what happened early in the film, but rather, who hired Benoit Blanc to look into an apparent suicide?
• Drugs Are Good: Played for Laughs; Marta playfully asks, "Do you want to do some drugs?" while fixing up Harlan's pain medication, followed by Harlan wondering why he waited until he was in his 80s to start using morphine. Marta makes clear, though, that she prescribed Harlan's morphine for an injury and he is only taking prescribed doses. Marta, Fran, and Meg also smoke pot together in a moment of bonding.
• Dying Clue: Just before she loses consciousness, Fran attempts to tell Marta who attacked her. Marta hears what she says as "You did this," and only later realizes that it was "Hugh did this," pointing the finger at Hugh Ransom Drysdale.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: Marta goes through a lot of shit, and two people die, but ultimately she does get Harlan's fortune and, it is implied, secures her mother's American citizenship.
• Economy Cast: When the medical examiner's office burns down, the detectives from the Thrombey murder case are the only police seen around.
• Emerging from the Shadows: When the interrogations begin, Blanc initially sits at the back of the room, occasionally playing a note hard on the piano, while Lieutenant Elliot actively questions everyone. Blanc steps up only when Linda calls attention to him.
• Engineered Public Confession: Marta lies about Fran having survived Ransom's attack, prompting the latter to deliver an angry Just Between You and Me confessing to the attempted murder, which one of the detectives records on his phone.
• Enter Stage Window: How Marta and Ransom get into the house undetected.
• Establishing Character Moment: The initial interviews serve as this for most of the supporting cast (and for Blanc, who silently listens and plays a note on the piano to prompt the detectives to ask about their time of arrival).
  • Linda plays the part of the daughter close to father, self-made like him (or so she insists). But he dialogue shows she's distant from everyone around her.
  • Richard meanwhile plays contrarian to Linda, but passive-aggressively, which sets up the state of their marriage.
  • Walt refers to his father's book as "our books" and tries to pass off his fathers achievements as his own, showcasing his impotence. He sugar coats the description of his son as "politically active" which is immediately contrasted with Richard and Meg's descriptions to emphasize it, and refers to his wife as "his rock" while the film simultaneously shows her as jumpy and nervous.
  • Joni is introduced claiming how close she is to the family in the middle of a shot of all of them ignoring her.
• Establishing Series Moment: The movie opens with the story cliché of a housekeeper bringing tea to someone, only to discover a dead body. But instead of a scream or a Dramatic Drop, she catches the tray before she spills it, cursing. Immediately this hints that the ensuing murder mystery is going to be a Genre Savvy Affectionate Parody.
• Ethnic Menial Labour: Marta is a highly-skilled nurse, but the Thrombeys treat her like a maid.
• Even Evil Can Be Loved: Despite their contentions, Richard tries to save Ransom from getting arrested.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • Invoked by Marta. She says that none of the family members would have killed Harlan, no matter their contentions with him. She's right about all of them except Ransom.
  • Every family member is a shithead to some degree, but Jacob's Nazi views disgust everybody but his parents, and he is called both a Nazi and an "alt-right troll". Even Richard, who cheats on his wife and disparages anyone who tries to come into the country illegally (even dismissing the fact that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement puts immigrant children in cages) calls him a Nazi with clear contempt.
  • Joni, whose main flaw is her greed, is openly and loudly opposed to Richard's anti-immigration views, thinking he's contemptible for excusing the terrible treatment that immigrant adults and children alike are subjected to, and when he pulls Marta into the argument to use her as what he thinks is a shining example of someone whose family did immigration "right," she sympathetically tells her that she doesn't have to be a paragon for his views for the sake of being polite. In the same scene, Walt noticeably tries to stop Donna from going on a racist rant, and Linda tries to stop Richard from pulling Marta into the argument, saying to him, "Leave the poor girl out of this."
  • Played with by Ransom. He was perfectly willing to kill Harlan to get his piece of the fortune, and even cunning enough to frame someone else for it. However, he claims he was doing it to protect his family's money.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good:
  • Lampshaded by Blanc, who notes that it never occurred to Ransom that Marta would be genuinely good enough to try and save the life of a witness who might implicate them in a crime.
  • Most of the Thrombeys suffer from this: they can't understand that Harlan left his fortune to Marta because he genuinely liked her, not because she "seduced" him. Nor does it seem to occur to any of them that she's the kind of person who'd use her inheritance to help them if they just asked instead of turning on her.
• Evil-Detecting Dog: Downplayed. The dogs do not exactly Detect Evil, but they only bark at strangers. The fact that dogs were barking the night Harlan died is a sign that there was a stranger on the property. Played straight in that they bark at Ransom — the culprit — when he arrives, likely because he doesn't treat them well. Lampshaded by Blanc, who notes that he has always felt that dogs are excellent judges of character.
• "Eureka!" Moment: Marta has two.
  • First, when Meg mentions Fran's stash to her where she then finds the toxicology report.
  • During The Summation, Ransom drops the line "you have her confession" which gives Marta the idea to concoct her own Engineered Public Confession.
• Exact Words:
  • Before dying, Harlan feeds Marta a bunch of partial truths to give the police so that she won't get sick over lying. Notably, she tells Blanc that she doesn't believe anyone in the family committed the murder since , as far as she's concerned, she did it.
  • When Great-Nana sees Marta climbing down the trellis, she remarks "Ransom, you're back again already?" It looks like a joke about her being a Scatterbrained Senior...but the precise wording of the phrase proves to be a vital clue: she says, "You're back again", revealing that he has already returned to the house once before.
• Explain, Explain... Oh, Crap!: After Alan reveals that Harlan's updated will has left his entire fortune, his publishing house and all his assets to Marta, Linda furiously demands that Alan, Blanc and the cops all leave and declares that they will fight this because "We are the Thrombeys, goddammit! This is still our house!" As the words leave her mouth, she suddenly goes pale and, along with the rest of the clan, sheepishly turns back to Alan, who adds that, no, Marta gets the house too.
• Expospeak Gag: Blanc's line when he first interviews Marta:
  Blanc: And a little bird has told me... how should I put this delicately? You have a regurgitative reaction to mistruthing.
• Face Framed in Shadow: Benoit Blanc's face when talking to Marta in front of the house at night.
• Fair-Play Whodunnit: The story gives you the clues necessary to figure out the villain before the climactic reveal. That said, it does monkey a bit with Ronald Knox's Ten Commandments of mystery fiction. Knox's Rule 8 is both directly violated (the viewer doesn't get to see the toxicology report that proves Harlan never took the fatal morphine overdose until The Summation) and turned on its head (the viewer learns about Marta's role in Harlan's death, complete with several critical pieces of evidence that point towards the true villain long before Blanc does).
• Fake Alibi: After Marta thinks she accidentally poisoned Harlan, Harlan orders her to leave the house in full view of the family, then sneak back inside and pretend to be Harlan before sneaking out again, so that she'll appear to have gone home well before Harlan seemingly committed suicide. It works on the cops who immediately dismiss her as a suspect, but not on Detective Blanc who catches Marta's more involved than she seems.
• Family Disunion: The family is all in town for Harlan's birthday party. Then he dies, so all of them must stay in town for the duration of the ongoing investigation.
• Family of Choice: Present as a theme. The remaining Thrombeys incessantly make a point of them being Harlan's "real" family and ergo more deserving of his possessions than Marta ever will be. However, through sheer compassion and dedication, she clearly becomes more like real family to him than his selfish, disloyal biological family. Reinforced also with Fran, another hired hand, who also goes to bat for Harlan at considerable risk to herself.
• Financial Abuse: Played with. A major force driving the conflict is Harlan's tightness of fist with his estate and inheritance. He believes he is forcing his family to be self-sufficient instead of mooching off him and doing nothing, while they believe he is keeping them under control while criticizing and controlling them and making boneheaded decisions, like not taking the opportunity to expand his franchise.
• Flipping the Table: Harlan does this to give Marta a tough time while the two of them are playing Go. She finds it Actually Pretty Funny and is laughing about him being a Sore Loser.
• Florence Nightingale Effect: Played for Drama; the Thrombeys bitterly accuse Marta, Harlan's nurse, of "seducing" him when she is named the Unexpected Successor to his estate.
• Foreshadowing: So many examples, it has its own page.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus:
  • The way the light catches the letter Harlan had planned to give Linda briefly shows that it is not blank. Later, Linda picks up a stack of letters from her father on the same letterhead. The letters all show heat damage from Linda's lighter. Linda later reveals that a message was on the letter in invisible ink.
  • The letter message itself, which is only seen briefly at the end, says, "My heart, it's time to cut the dead wood. He's cheating on you. I have proof I know you don't need to see. Untether yourself. It's time."
  • Eagle-eyed viewers will spot a particularly damning piece of foreshadowing when the security footage is viewed — despite having stormed out of the party early, we never see Ransom's car heading down the driveway.
  • The fact the blackmail letter is torn across the bottom is extremely easy to dismiss when Marta opens it, but becomes very relevant during The Reveal.
  • In a less plot-relevant bonus, the blue arrow from Brick appears during the car chase.
• Funeral Banishment: Harlan Thrombey was extremely close to his nurse Marta, to the point that he named her as his sole inheritor. Despite this, when Harlan dies his surviving family doesn't invite her to the funeral, only allowing family members to attend. Humorously, most of the family members Marta talks to claim that she's "basically part of the family" and that they wanted to invite her but got "outvoted".
• Fun with Homophones: Ransom's first name Hugh sounds, especially with a Hispanic accent, a lot like "you." Marta specifically must stress an English "H" when catching the detail aloud.
• Fun with Subtitles: Ransom refers to Blanc's summation as being "stupid with two 'o's." The film's subtitles spell the word as "stoopid" when he says this.
• Gambit Pileup: When Blanc untangles the events surrounding Harlan's death, it ends up being one of these: Ransom is attempting to disinherit Marta by framing her for Harlan's death; Harlan's Thanatos Gambit is intended to save her from the consequences of aforementioned framing; and Fran is attempting to counter Ransom's plot. There's also another gambit going on, Marta's Xanatos Speed Chess attempts to cover Harlan's Thanatos Gambit, but this has already been resolved by the time Blanc gets to the bottom of everything.
• Game Night Fight: Turns out to be a Chekhov's Gag. The narrative invokes it lightly when Marta wins at Go (which she always does because she is not playing dirty or to win but to make a beautiful pattern), and Harlan flips the board, pretending to be angry. This mixes up the medications causing Marta to accidentally inject him with the wrong medicine, which leads to conflict as Harlan tries to help Marta cover up his accidental death. Or it apparently does. It is a Red Herring — Ransom switched the medicine, but Marta picked up the correct vial anyway, because she was so well practiced, she did it automatically.
• Generation Xerox: Most of the younger Thrombeys are flanderized versions of their parents. This is to show how poor parenting and setting a bad example poisons the next generation. There's also ample irony in the parents not liking how their children turned out even if the younger generation is simply imitating the older.
  • Jacob has clearly inherited his parents' racism, though he takes it to an extreme that even they find distasteful.
  • Joni's Bourgeois Bohemian lifestyle influenced Meg's "SJW" degree.
  • Ransom inherited his father's racism and his mother's (and by extension his grandfather's) intelligence. His lazy slacker lifestyle also partly comes from Richard setting a poor example as a Gold Digger who does nothing but leech off his wife.
  • All the Thrombeys, of course, share a similar arrogant, selfish and entitled attitude.
• Genre Savvy:
  • Harlan was a mystery writer and as such casually invokes mystery tropes around his home. He builds a trick window into his house, sends messages in invisible ink, and uses his knowledge of mystery plots to obscure the circumstances of his death in his last few minutes of life. Discussed at the end with regards to Marta, as Benoit points out that her kind heart was more important than Harlan's genre-savviness.
  • Trooper Wagner, one of the police investigating, is a big fan of Harlan Thrombey's novels, and notes that the mystery is playing out just like one of them. He notes the trick window and Locked Room Mystery. When Benoit is giving The Summation in the climax, Wagner can't help but crack a Grin of Audacity, and even shushes Detective Elliot when he tries to interrupt once.
• Genre Throwback: To Agatha Christie-style detective fiction and murder mysteries. It is set in 2018 but has the trappings of the genre, including a man murdered in a Big Fancy House, a Poirot-esque Gentleman Detective, and a Big, Screwed-Up Family who all have motives. Lt. Elliot even refers to the estate as a "Clue board."
• The Ghost:
  • Neil, Harlan's son who died fifteen years before the movie's events. He serves as his wife Joni and daughter Meg's bridge to the Thrombeys but receives no posthumous characterization whatsoever.
  • Fran's cousin who works as a receptionist at the medical examiner's office. Through her she gets a copy of Harlan's toxicology report and attempts to blackmail the real killer, Ransom.
  • The woman Richard is cheating with is only seen vaguely in photographs and is never named and makes no appearances in person.
• Gilligan Cut: When Linda realizes that Blanc is trying to bait out from her that Walt is not a Self-Made Man, she asserts that Walt works hard at the publishing company Harlan left to him and that none of the family would ever criticize him. Cut to Richard, who gleefully boasts about how lazy Walt is and the little amount of work he does with Harlan's novels.
• Godwin's Law:
  • Joni invokes this while bickering about politics at Harlan's party; she does not name Adolf Hitler but refers to him obliquely as somebody whom people thought would "restore order" in Germany in the 1920s.
  • Other characters call Jacob a Nazi, using it as a derogative even though they are also racist, just subtler, and politer.
• Good Capitalism, Evil Capitalism: The film depicts a family of Self-Made men and women. Except only the patriarch, Harlan Thrombey, worked hard to get where he was due to writing his books. While he places his children in positions, they are mostly just faces of his company still bragging about being self-made. He ends up leaving his entire will to his Nurse, Marta, who has been both kind and hard-working.
• Gratuitous Spanish: Marta and her family natively speak Spanish, and while they mostly use English throughout the film, her sister and less often her mother occasionally use simple recognizable Spanish words.
• Grey-and-Gray Morality: Most of the Thrombey family may be extremely white-bread vultures grubbing over money, but they do have a few redeeming traits — notably, their nastiness towards Marta after the will is revealed isn't wholly racism, but trying to protect their own family, and it's clear that Harlan wasn't the best role model to them either. Even the actual murderer was planning to share Harlan's property with the rest of the family, not keep it all to themselves.
• Halfway Plot Switch: Zig-zagged. The film begins as a straightforward whodunnit until we get a flashback that shows the circumstances of Harlan's death quite plainly, shifting the story from "who killed him?" to "how can Harlan's kindhearted accidental murderer get away with it to protect her mother while facing pressure from becoming his surprise sole inheritor?" The story thus appears to switch from a mystery to a thriller dealing with the consequences of the mystery's answer... until Blanc probes the question of who hired him and a blackmailer enters the picture, confirming that there is still a mystery going on, and layers that indicate foul play to be revealed.
• Hand Gagging: After the accidental poisoning, Harlan prevents Marta from arguing with him over the best course of action by covering her mouth with his hand.
• Heel Realization:
  • When Ransom probes Marta for the reason he left everything to her, she says it had more to do with them (Ransom's family) than anything she did, referring to their greed, narcissism, and entitlement. Ransom accepts this and acknowledges that he and his family are inadequate inheritors.He actually subscribed to that belief early on, believing his family to be hypocrites claiming to be "self-made" while they are almost entirely dependent on Harlan (or, in Richard's case, on Linda). He himself has no trouble being or acknowledging that he is Idle Rich. He still wants the money, though, and in fact commits the murder purely to continue having it.
  • This is actually what sets off the conflict in the film is Harlan realizing that his constant support of his family has stunted them, making them dependent on him and unwilling to go out into the world and make something of themselves. He even suspects, subconsciously, that he did it to keep Walt under control. Thus, he hopes by cutting them off they will need to take charge of their lives.
  • Meg apologizes to Marta for her actions over the course of the film, but it's ambiguous how sincere she's being. It's heavily implied she was forced into doing it by the rest of the family, but does that absolve her of going through with it anyway?
• Hidden Depths:
  • Ransom first appears as a standard "black sheep of the family" kid surviving entirely on his trust fund, something the other characters even claim outright. His actions during the family meeting serve to further reinforce his idea. However, the fact that he could effortlessly corner Marta into telling him (and only him) the truth shows a degree of intelligence, charisma, and cunning beneath the surface.
• Hired to Hunt Yourself: During the second act, Marta is selected by Blanc to be his "Watson" and help him figure out the mystery, while she and the audience believe that Marta was incontrovertibly responsible for Harlan's death. Being forced to investigate her own apparent crime results in Marta having to think quickly and unhappily destroy evidence while she's on the case with Blanc beside her. In this case, however, the hirer was aware of the dynamic from the start—Blanc saw blood on Marta's shoe and realized she had a significant role in Harlan's death, but trusted her good nature enough to keep her by his side regardless while he figured out what else factored into the death.
• Hollywood New England: Averted; the film is set in Massachusetts, but none of the obvious stereotypes appear. If you look closely during the car chase, you will spot a bumper sticker celebrating Boston Bruins hockey player Patrice Bergeron, but that is it.
• Hot Pursuit: A silly one given that Marta is not an experienced getaway driver and behind the wheel of a crappy car that can barely go 60mph.
• Hourglass Plot: The first time Marta appears at the Thrombey house, she is looking upwards at the house and members of the family from the driveway. In the last scene, the surviving members of the Thrombey family are all standing in the same spot in the driveway, looking up at Marta on the balcony, nicely signifying that they have reversed roles.
• Hypocritical Humor: Marta's sister is watching a murder mystery on TV, and her mother angrily demands that she turn it off so that it will not distress Marta by reminding her of Harlan's death. (What makes it hypocritical is that Marta is sitting right there, and her mother has just reminded her of Harlan's death.)
  • Also that night when Marta comes home her mom is watching a Spanish dubbed Murder, She Wrote.

I to P

• Ice-Cream Koan:
  • While driving with Marta, Blanc reflects on how confusing the case is and compares it to a doughnut because they both have holes in the middle, and quickly descends into a rambling monologue where he compares the case to other things such as a tangled slinky. Later, after realizing Ransom is the killer and he had tried to frame Marta, Blanc compares the case to a doughnut with what appears to be a hole in the middle, but the hole is actually a smaller doughnut with another hole in the middle.
  • In the in-theater commentary track, Johnson notes during Blanc's "I anticipate the terminus of gravity's rainbow" speech that all great literary detectives have a sort of philosophical-sounding catchphrase that explains their methods but does not actually mean anything—and Blanc's is no different.
• Idiot Ball: Fran attempts to smoke out Ransom as the killer by arranging to meet him alone in a secluded area where he can easily overpower and murder her. Even if she did intend to blackmail him, it was still a dumb move.
• The Illegal: Marta's mother came to the U.S. illegally and is undocumented.
• Immediate Self-Contradiction: Blanc first appears sitting quietly in the background as Lt. Elliot questions the witnesses. When one of them objects to his presence, he says that he is only there as a "respectful, quiet, passive observer" — and then comes forward and takes over the questioning.
• Inadequate Inheritor: It surprises nobody that Harlan writes Ransom out of his will. Leaving everything to Marta does shock the rest of the family, however.
• Informed Attribute:
  • Ransom appears in promotional clips as "a playboy." However, we never see him in a sexual or romantic context to prove this. He does show a combination of charm and manipulative tendencies to Marta, but it's clear he tricked her by playing into her kindness rather than any sort of attraction to him.
  • Joni and Meg's "Marxist" politics are only described by others, and they seem fine being complicit in both coveting the inheritance and threatening to deport Marta's mother, though Meg seems to feel genuine guilt about it immediately afterwards and profusely apologizes to Marta. This is also low-key Hypocritical Humor.
• Inherently Funny Words: The Thrombey household is located at Kenoak Drive, leading Blanc on a tangent when he hears it.
  Blanc: "Kenoak." That's fun to say, isn't it? "I awoke, amid Kenoak."
• Inheritance Murder: A variant: Ransom attempted to murder Harlan because he'd been disinherited. If Marta became held legally responsible for Harlan's death, she would lose the inheritance, and the court would spread Harlan's assets among the Thrombeys. Unfortunately for Ransom, his unwitting proxy, Marta, inadvertently foiled the murder attempt and Harlan killed himself to prevent Marta, who thinks she overdosed him, from being held responsible. Because she never overdosed him and Harlan killed himself, Ransom scrambles to destroy proof of Marta's innocence before he is found out and she earns her inheritance.
• Inspector Lestrade: Lt. Elliot's main purposes are to disagree with Blanc over whether Harlan's death is suicide and perform police procedures with Blanc and Marta in tow. Contrast with Trooper Wagner, who also contributes very little to the actual solving of the crime but is nevertheless having an absolute ball with this Troperiffic mystery and thus goes along with all Blanc's theories.
• Intergenerational Friendship: Elderly Harlan and young Marta, who becomes as much his confidante as his nurse. She even says that he employed her because "he needed a friend."
• Intro Dump: The film opens with the police interviewing all the members of the family one at a time. This efficiently spells out who everyone is (except for Ransom, who appears later) and what their relationships are.
• Invisible Writing: Richard is relieved to find that a note Harlan had written exposing his affair was just a bluff — a blank piece of paper in an envelope. At the end of the film, Linda lights a small flame under the note, revealing the writing and, thus, the affair.^note The note reads: "My heart, It's time to cut the dead wood. He's cheating on you. I have proof. I know you don't need to see. Untether yourself. It's time — Dad."
• Ironic Echo: When the family hears that Harlan decided to cut Ransom out of his will, they say it "might be the best thing that ever happened to you" (in that it might teach him self-sufficiency). Later, after discovering Harlan cut the rest of his family off as well and left all his assets to Marta, Ransom yells the same thing back at them before speeding away in his car with Marta.
  Richard: What the hell did he mean by that?
• Ironic Name: Jacob, the neo-Nazi with one of the most Jewish names one can think of.
• Irony: Twice.
  • Ransom hates the rest of his family, but turns out to have been motivated to murder Harlan in order to protect the money (or so he claims) his family deserves... which is what has been motivating the rest of the family to be so antagonistic to Marta.
  • As it turns out, Ransom wanted the money for the same reason Harlan gave it to Marta - he didn't want the rest of the family to piss it away, partially to protect them from themselves.
• Joke Item: The knife Ransom grabs on the display in his murder attempt on Marta at the end turns out to be a stage knife, with a harmless blade that retracts upon hitting a surface.
• Kick the Dog: While most of Harlan's actions towards his kids are rather deserved, cutting Linda and Walt out of the will was especially cruel since they didn't do anything to deserve it. He seems to acknowledge it with Linda when writing her a letter revealing her husband was cheating on her, apologizing and saying she deserves better. Walt however, is fired despite doing nothing wrong as Harlan even points out and is never given an explanation for being cut off.
  • Regarding Walt, there is a deleted scene revealing that Walt has actually been stealing from the publishing house to cover his gambling debts, and that his limp is from a loan shark looking to collect. This is the real reason why Harlan fired Walt. He knew.
  • Also Fran, doubling as a nice bit of Fridge Horror. She dies sticking up for Harlan and trying to expose Ransom's role in his demise. She and Marta are portrayed as the only two people who genuinely care for Harlan, but if she hadn't been killed; she would still have been left out of the new will, leaving Marta with everything and her with nothing.
• Kill the Cutie: Poor Fran adored Harlan, but being discreet and trying to smoke out Ransom on her own ends up getting her killed for her efforts. Later subverted in the case of Marta.
• Lampshade Hanging:
  • Blanc tells Marta not to get too excited about the will reading, pointing out that, unlike in fiction, these affairs tend to be "like a community theater reading of tax code." After the reading turns into a twist-filled dramatic event, he shrugs and says it's "the exception that proves the rule."
  • When it is revealed that Marta pukes when she lies, Lieutenant Elliot and Trooper Wagner exchange glances, recognizing that this is obviously something that doesn't happen in real life.
• Like Father, Like Son:
  • Richard is an Angry White Man who goes on a xenophobic and racist tirade during a crucial flashback. He only spares Marta because he believes she's one of the "good ones" whose family came to the USA completely legally and tries to rope her into agreeing with him in front of everyone. As it turns out, his son Ransom is also framing her for murder, and his rant about how his grandfather's property should go to the Thrombeys, as it's their birthright, draws marked parallels with Richard's hostility towards "outsiders."
  • Meg, like Joni, is an ostensibly socially conscious liberal who argues against prejudice towards minorities but is fully prepared to turn on them the moment her own way of life is threatened, though unlike her mother, she feels terrible about it, and apologizes profusely.
  • Jacob surprisingly takes after both his parents. He takes after his mother from her brief and aggressive anti-immigration rant. However, despite appearing to be better than both, Walt also turns on Marta and threatens to have her mother deported when he learns that she was Harlan's sole heir.
• Literal Metaphor: Towards the beginning of the film, Harlan criticizes Ransom for "playing life like a game without consequence, till you can't tell the difference between a stage prop and a real knife." In context he is referring to Ransom's tendency to behave as he likes, carelessly manipulating and hurt those around him. He's long dead by the time Ransom actually tries to stab someone with a prop knife, having believed it's a real one.
• Lost in Translation: Blanc's southern accent is not kept in French, as French dubs famously only ever use the Parisian accent for every character. However, Ransom's CSI:KFC joke remains, which now sounds like a racist jab at the only black man in the room. Not that it would be excessively out of character.
• Low-Speed Chase: Downplayed: Marta's car can about exceed the speed limit... at best. The police are doing over 80 while her car is struggling to hit 60, so she eventually resorts to braking hard so they shoot ahead of her.
• Lying by Omission: Marta is literally unable to tell a lie without immediately puking, so this is just about her only defense when being questioned during the murder investigation. When Benoit interviews her about her whereabouts the night of Harlan's death, she — choosing her words very carefully — says that as his nurse, she took him upstairs around midnight, gave him his pain medication, then went home, excluding the fact that to her knowledge, she had accidentally given him a fatal overdose. She still ends up vomiting once the interview is over and is out of sight.
• Lying to the Perp: Marta cons Ransom into believing that Fran survived his attack since he's much quicker to confess to attempted murder than to actual murder. Since this involves Marta lying about a phone call, it gets a little messy.
• Major Injury Underreaction: When Marta tells Harlan that he has received the wrong dosage and his life is in danger, he seems amused and inspired to work this into a novel. When he realizes that the drug that could save his life is missing, however, he becomes deadly serious. In hindsight, it's a sign that he wasn't actually dying.
• Make It Look Like an Accident: Ransom's plan is to make Harlan's death look like an accident by Marta. He has her fooled for the movie.
• Match Cut: A close-up of the seal of the chief medical examiner's office fades to a shot of that same seal on the side of the medical examiner's building, revealing the arson fire that took place.
• Meaningful Background Event: While Marta is screwing up the courage to admit what happened to the Thrombeys, Blanc can be seen in the background opening and reading the toxicology report, which proves what really happened.
• Meaningful Echo: Marta offers to support Meg through school in almost the exact words that Meg used to promise that Marta would be taken care of. How well Meg takes it reflects on the sincerity with which the original promise was made.
• Medication Tampering: Harlan discusses with Marta what an effective means of murdering someone switching their medications would be. This happens after Marta has seemingly just injected him with a lethal dose of morphine after picking up the wrong vial. Later we discover that Ransom had earlier deliberately switched the contents of the vials of morphine and ketorolac so Marta would inject a fatal overdose. However, Marta instinctively picked up the correct vial without looking at the labels so no accidental overdose ever actually occurred.
• Middle Name Basis: Hugh Ransom Thrombey-Drysdale chooses to go by "Ransom". He makes the family's employees call him by his first name which Fran does when Marta finds her.
• Mistaken Nationality: Members of the Thrombey family refer to Marta's family on separate occasions to have emigrated from multiple, incorrect countries from Latin Land, including Ecuador, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Brazil (A country where the primary language is Portuguese). This is one of the hints that despite them claiming they care for her as a part of their family, the Thrombeys really do not and indeed are very xenophobic once circumstances turn against them. We never actually find out where her family is from.
• Molotov Cocktail: The killer uses one to torch the medical examiner's office and destroy the remaining evidence.
• Money Is Not Power:
  • At the end, when it's revealed that Ransom was responsible for Harlan's death, and killed Fran to cover his tracks, Richard is seen trying to give the two cops escorting Ransom to the squad car a large wad of cash to let him go. They scoff and continue their duties.
  • However subverted right at the end and invoked multiple times. Marta realizes that she can help her mother get citizenship with her new wealth and she is shown at the very end looming over the remaining family as the new owner of Harlan's estate.
• Mood Whiplash:
  • The flashback scene that caps off the first act. Marta and Harlan go through their nightly care routine, with Harlan badgering her into a game of Go and behaving petulantly about losing to make her laugh. Harlan then reflects on the night as Marta gives him his medicine, and Marta jokes about "doing drugs" to prepare his small morphine dose...and notices the label on the medicine she just gave him a large dose of. It says "morphine". The scene quickly shifts into tragedy and drama as Marta breaks down telling Harlan she just lethally overdosed him and can't find the antidote, as Harlan comes up with a plan to save her skin. After a montage of her steps, we see Marta going to protest the plan...and Harlan slits his throat. The tonal shift is quick and harsh, and the apparently whole, shocking picture of Harlan's death drops out of nowhere, springing from a calm scene and shaking up the whole film afterward.
  • A good description of Marta's final confrontation with the Thrombeys before the killer is exposed, as she is about to admit what happened to Harlan, despite the risk of arrest and the fact that doing this will cost her the inheritance before Blanc steps in after reading the toxicology report to denounce them all and take Marta away, as he realises from the report that Marta actually did nothing to Harlan even by accident.
  • Later when Blanc deduces that Ransom was responsible for Harlan's death and tried to kill Fran by overdose, the scene is tense when the latter says that there will be a team of lawyers anyway and that they will take legal action. Marta then vomits all over his face, causing the detectives to laugh and realize that she was lying, before the fairly grim reveal that Fran ended up overdosing.
• Motifs: Games.
  • Linda mentions that she had to find a game in order to communicate with Harlan.
  • Harlan comments that Ransome tended to treat life too much like a game.
  • Marta, while playing Go with Harlan, says she doesn't play to win, but to find "a beautiful pattern".
  • Lieutenant Elliot comments that the Thrombey estate looks like a Clue board.
  • Blanc in the end tells Marta that she won, not by playing the game the Thrombeys' way but by playing the game her way.
• Motive = Conclusive Evidence:
  • Initially subverted: Blanc tries to claim that the Thrombeys having a motive to murder Harlan is a good enough reason to investigate the case as a murder, rather than close it as a suicide. Lt. Elliot dismisses this as "weaksauce", forcing Blanc to admit that his own curiosity over an anonymous envelope full of cash primarily motivates him.
  • Played straight at the end, when Blanc and Marta manage to deduce Ransom's guilt using nothing but motive (he was the only one who knew about Harlan's new will) and his conspicuous absence from Harlan's birthday party and funeral.
• Murder by Inaction: Subverted. Ransom set Marta up to find Fran dying of an overdose and assumed she would let her die to cover up her tracks. Marta hesitates only briefly, before calling an ambulance.
• Murder Is the Best Solution: Ransom leaps rather quickly to murder as the solution for his and his family's "disinheritance" problem, rather than exploring other possible avenues.
• Musical Theme Naming: The suspects and their spouses are named after musicians:
  • Walt and Donna — Steely Dan.
  • Joni and Neil — Joni Mitchell and Neil Young
  • Richard and Linda — Richard and Linda Thompson.
• My God, What Have I Done?:
  • When Marta thinks that she killed Harlan after accidentally giving him the wrong dosage of medicine.
  • Meg appears to react like this after her family bullies her into blackmailing Marta over the inheritance with her mother's immigration status. Whether it was sincere or not is anyone's guess but considering that she reacted like that right after (when only around her family) and is not a particularly good actor, the narrative implies that her reaction is genuine.
• My Greatest Second Chance: Marta feels incredibly guilty that she wasn't able to call an ambulance for Harlan because he hung up the phone and tripped her when she was about to run and get the family. When she finds a semiconscious Fran, Marta only hesitates for a moment before dialing 911 and starting chest compressions. As far as Karmic Jackpot goes, Fran making it to the hospital and her copy of the tox report clears Marta's name.
• Mysterious Employer: Benoit Blanc gets anonymously employed to investigate the suicide case, and the police think his obsession with their identity is a case of Skewed Priorities. It's actually a key part of resolving the mystery.
• Narration Echo: When Elliot walks Blanc through his notes, flashbacks in which the family members repeat his words go with his narration.
  Elliot: He [Harlan] explained that they had just knocked over the Go board.
  Harlan: [to Joni in a flashback] I just knocked over the Go board.
• Necro Cam: The Summation has flashbacks of how Ransom did the crime.
• Never One Murder: As expected for a murder mystery, multiple people die...but it's subverted since, by the end, it turns out that the second and final victim, Fran, was the first and only murder. Harlan's death was purely a misguided suicide, despite said suicide being the response to an incident that was wrongly perceived as a deadly accident and was also the failed payoff of attempted murder by proxy. The would-be killer, Ransom, only actually became a murderer by trying to cover his tracks with Fran, and that crime is what ultimately leaves him with no hope of evading justice.
• Never Suicide: Zig-Zagging Trope. Harlan appears to have died by straightforward suicide, but his death is investigated by Blanc as a murder. Then we learn that it was suicide, but done by Harlan in the face of Accidental Murder—killing himself to protect Marta legally and safeguard her inheritance after she sees the medicine she gave him was from the morphine bottle, and thus a lethal overdose due to the volume she administered. When further foul play comes to light, it actually turns out someone used Marta to murder Harlan because the vials' contents were switched on purpose to get Marta to make the dosing error...but the tox report ultimately exonerates her completely because she instinctually gave the correct dose in spite of the mislabeled bottles which she didn't read. It was only thinking she lethally dosed him by reading the bottles after the fact that put Harlan's suicide gambit into action. There was no Accidental Murder on Marta's part, and though the uncovered foul play brought in complications, her nursing skill nullified them entirely. Harlan was not in mortal danger, and despite the film presenting the compelling explanations of "accidental homicide" or "murder by proxy" leading up to the final details, his death was ultimately a noble but utterly needless suicide.
• Never Trust a Trailer: The trailers present Blanc as the main protagonist and Marta as one of the supporting characters (in this one, she does not even have lines), when in the film itself it is the other way around.
• Newhart Phone Call: After The Summation has been laid out, Marta gets a phone call from the hospital regarding the fate of Fran after her attack by Ransom. We don't hear the other side of the call, just Marta remarking that it's good news, whereupon she tells the group that Fran survived. However, the one-sidedness of the phone call was a trick of the film to obscure for the audience as well as Ransom that Marta was lying about the news. Fran actually died, which Marta instantly knew meant testimony proving Ransom's guilt had been lost. Marta thinks quickly while still on the line and feigns good news, and hangs up and lies that Fran is alive so Ransom will gloat and confess to what he thinks are lesser crimes he can lawyer his way out of. He confesses to the attempted murder of Fran, which is seconds later revealed by Marta to be successful murder, legally condemning him.
• Newscaster Cameo: When the news crews gather outside Marta's home, the TV shows a clip of a reporter broadcasting from outside the house. The reporter is local New England sports talk show host Gary Tanguay.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
  • Invoked but ultimately subverted with Marta's actions. Ransom wants her to believe she did this when she injected Harlan with the wrong medication. In fact, Marta could pick out the right medication despite the swapped contents.
  • However, this leads to Harlan playing it sadly straight: When Marta tells him she accidentally injected him with the wrong medication, he kills himself rather than let anyone suspect she was responsible. He refuses even to let her call the police. This would have revealed she had picked out the right medication and Harlan wasn't about to die at all.
  • Fran accidentally gave Ransom a means to frame Marta for her death by confronting him in a dark abandoned laundromat, rather than telling the cops what she saw on the day of the funeral. Her blackmailing him also led him to realize that someone else had access to the toxicology report, which motivated him to burn down the chief medical examiner's office.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain:
  • Played with, but ultimately subverted with Ransom hiring Blanc. While he inadvertently provided Marta with the ally that she needed to prove that she had nothing to do with Harlan's death, the police would have passed over the affair as suicide and he would not have successfully framed her anyway. Instead, it was his manipulation of Marta that allows him to coax the (wrong) confession out of her. Rather, this mistake sends Ransom to jail as it revealed his own crime.
  • Ransom seals his fate by passing on Fran's blackmail letter to Marta so that she will find Fran's overdosed body and ostensibly be Mistaken for Murderer when Ransom makes an "anonymous" phone call to the cops. If not for that action, Fran could have been missing for days and died before she was able to tell Marta about her backup copy of the stash report or name her killer. Mind that Marta is a trained nurse with a guilty conscience, who considered Fran as a friend. She performs CPR and calls 911, helped by the fact that Ransom was not able to make an anonymous tip ahead of time. As Benoit smugly points out, Fran was an eyewitness to Ransom tampering with Harlan's medication, and had the sense to store a backup copy of the tox report. Ransom also underestimated Marta's fundamentally good nature to save a person who needed her help. With Marta's CPR and quick response getting Fran to the hospital, they have someone that can attest to Ransom's guilt, as well as the proof that Marta is innocent. Even though Fran dies in the hospital, her presence is key to solving the case.
  • Walt tries to intimidate and coerce Marta by revealing his knowledge of her mother's illegal status, and claiming that if she renounces the inheritance, they could drum up some real New York lawyers to help legalize her mother. However, Marta then realizes that with the inheritance, she herself could hire those lawyers to help her mother without the Thrombeys' help. She then slams the door on Walt, who has just lost one of the only real advantages the family had over her.
• Nice to the Waiter: Used on multiple levels:
  • Harlan initially hired Marta as a part-time nurse but over time came to view her as a friend and confidante. The scene of him playfully joking with Marta and then sacrificing himself for her sake set up a significant contrast with his strict behavior as family patriarch. To a lesser extent, he was also perfectly cordial to Fran, which was why she was angry and devastated on realizing that Ransom meant to murder him.
  • The Thrombeys act nice to Marta and the other servants, but in an ostentatious and condescending fashion that suggests it is mostly an act. Most notably, while several of them claim that Marta is "part of the family", each of them seems to have a different idea of what country Marta's family originates from (suggesting they're just assuming and have never bothered to find out), Linda and Walt both claim to have been "outvoted" on the subject of inviting Marta to the funeral, and while we see Richard call Marta over to join with the other family members in one flashback, a later one reveals that it's just to use her as a prop in a casually racist argument he is making.And, of course, when it's revealed that Harlan has left his entire fortune to Marta, then the façade drops away and the real entitled viciousness comes out.
  • Meg is a more complex and ambiguous version of this, as she seems genuine in her appreciation of Marta and Fran, treating Marta like a sister and partaking in Fran's weed stash. However, when push comes to shove she ends up siding with the rest of the family over Marta, and while she does seem to genuinely regret it, it can be debated whether she is sincere or is just better at putting up a mask of kindness and righteousness to mask her own nastiness, entitlement and privilege (though the narrative weight — since her immediate reaction is a guilty expression in the face of her family, and she's not mentioned/demonstrated to be a good actor — is towards the former).
  • Ransom is the opposite of this trope, but when we see him interacting with Marta, he is quite nice to her. It's all an act to manipulate her, and ultimately he's definitely not this trope. A plot point turns out to be that he makes the staff refer to him by his given name, Hugh "because he's an asshole."
  • Benoit Blanc is genuinely this trope, treating Marta with sincere respect and coming to form a friendly bond with her. This is set up early on after he provokes her into a lie and honestly startled and apologetic when doing so causes her to vomit, saying that he had not realized that she meant that "lying makes me vomit" literally.
• No Adaptations Allowed: An In-Universe example. Harlan does not want any of his books adapted into films or television, although Walt insists there's good money since he got a deal from Netflix.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed:
  • The Thrombey family's repeated insistence that they are "self-made" and seeming obliviousness to the fact that they have spent their entire lives leeching off their patriarch in a variety of ways seems to be deliberately set up to mirror the Trump dynasty, such as Linda claiming she started her own real estate company before Ransom later says that she "started it up" with a million-dollar loan from Harlan, taken straight up from a previous boast Trump had made before the 2016 US Presidential election.
  • Likewise, no specific names come up during the political argument scene, but their political views sound a great deal like those of Trump and his supporters.
• Noodle Incident:
  • Trooper Wagner admires a plot point of Harlan's involving "a cow and a shotgun."
  • Ransom knows about Marta's condition due to a game of Mafia the family played on the Fourth of July, with no further details given.
• Notable Non Sequitur: About every innocuous piece of conversation turns out to have significance to the plot, most not explained till The Summation. Examples include:
  • Ransom explaining that he makes the help call him Hugh.
  • The family complaining that Ransom didn't attend Harlan's funeral.
  • "Ransom, are you back again already?"
  • Fran describing the plot of a Hallmark movie starring Danica McKellar to Marta.
  • Fran mentioning her cousin who is a receptionist at the medical examiner's office.
• Not Hyperbole: Marta claims that she has an involuntary habit of compulsive vomiting every time she tells a lie. After she answers falsely to one of Blanc's questions, her stomach gurgles, and she goes ahead to vomit into a potted plant right in front of them. The officers all react with alarm, saying they did not realize she was being that literal.
• "Not So Different" Remark: Harlan notes that Ransom is like himself as a younger man, which is one of the reasons why they particularly spark off each other. Harlan also ruefully muses that he could have encouraged Ransom's positive qualities more as a result.
• Not-So-Fake Prop Weapon: Inverted when Ransom tries to murder Marta.
• Obfuscating Postmortem Wounds: This is preemptively done by a dying Harlan, who in an effort to hide the fact his nurse accidentally overdosed him, slit his throat to protect her and prevent anyone from realizing the nurse's fatal error.
• Oblivious Guilt Slinging: Richard and Meg tell Marta that the family have decided to support her as thanks for looking after Harlan, unknowingly heightening the guilt she feels over the part she believes she played in Harlan's death.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • Marta has this reaction when she thinks she has given Harlan an overdose of morphine.
  • During the climax when Ransom gloats that he can beat an attempted murder. When Marta's stomach gurgles loudly (showing she just lied) Ransom reacts like she just pulled a gun on him.
  • Moments later Marta gets one of her own as Ransom lunges at her with a knife and the police are too far away to stop him.
  • Ransom then gets it again when he realizes the knife he tried to use to kill Marta is just a prop.
• Once More, with Clarity:
  • Each character describes Harlan's birthday party as being an enjoyable fun time and the family as generally getting along. As Blanc questions each family member increasingly, the true picture appears of a highly dysfunctional family dynamic.
  • Likewise, each character's story ends with them and their spouse/children the ones smiling and sitting behind/next to Harlan as the birthday cake is set down, showing they are closest to him. As the real-life flashbacks show, probably either Marta or no one at all were next to him.
  • Fran's last conversation with Marta blaming her for murdering Harlan, when she actually said Hugh did this.
• Only One Finds It Fun: When Blanc steps in and declares that Marta will not renounce her inheritance, the whole family looks devastated except for Great-Nana, who starts giggling.
• Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping: Toni Collette’s otherwise flawless American vocal fry slips on Joni’s “money wiring issue” line, when lying to the police about why Harlan threatened to cut her off.
• Outliving One's Offspring:
  • Wanetta "Great Nana" Thrombey. A more unusual example than most as Harlan was 85 at death, and Nana herself is unlikely to be less than 100. But the trope is still in full effect. Especially when none of her grandchildren or great-grandchildren comforts her about the loss of Harlan.
  • Harlan himself outlived his elder son, Neil.
• Passed-Over Inheritance: A week before his death, Harlan changed his will to disinherit his children and their spouses and children and give all his possessions to his immigrant caretaker Marta instead, sparking outrage among the family.
• Pass the Popcorn: Ransom knew he would not inherit a cent from Harlan (because he told him). He attended the inheritance reading anyway in anticipation of his family's bickering. When Richard and Walt come to blows, he happily munches on cookies, while exclaiming "We gotta do this more often!"
• Pastiche: Of Agatha Christie mysteries – Characters overtly describe Daniel Craig's Benoit Blanc as a "new Poirot."
• Pedal-to-the-Metal Shot: Done twice at the start and during the Car Chase with Marta hitting the pedal hard.
• Pet the Dog:
  • Even though Harlan has issues with most of his children, he is fond of Linda and doesn't have any quarrels with her onscreen. His cutting her out of the will was a form of Tough Love. In fact, when he finally leaves a letter with invisible ink revealing that Richard is cheating on her, he apologizes and says that his daughter deserves better.
  • Linda, despite her quarrels with Walt, defends him against the police insinuating that he may have killed their father.
  • Literally with Linda, who pets and plays with the dogs. Though by no means a good person, Linda is consistently portrayed as one of the less awful people in her family.
  • Later with Walt, who comforts Linda over their father's death.
  • In a twisted sense, Ransom's intention to distribute Harlan's fortune among his family. Rather than a scheme to keep all the money, he thinks even his asshole cousins and uncle deserve a cut.
  • Blanc also does this for Marta, as he quickly figures out there's more going than meets the eye, but she's too kind and nice a person to be capable of murder, and he spotted the drop of blood on her shoe. There's clearly something going on, but she's no murderer. At the end, he also makes it clear that in his opinion, she should keep the entire inheritance, exactly as Harlan wanted.
  • Harlan does this in a big way for Marta after thinking she'd accidentally given him an overdose. Instead of getting angry or despondent he immediately sets himself to arranging things so that she doesn't get blamed for his death and still gets to keep all the inheritance he's willing to her.
• Platonic Life-Partners: In-Universe, even the media get in on guessing that Harlan and Marta were having an affair, but their relationship truly was just an extraordinarily strong, entirely platonic Intergenerational Friendship that winds up being the cornerstone of the whole plot.
• Plot-Driven Breakdown: Marta's car refuses to start when she tries to flee the will reading, with all Harlan's family in pursuit insisting that she can't benefit from his will. Ransom pulls up in his car and encourages her to jump in, then drives her away. It is notable that Ransom left the reading before she did, did he deliberately tamper with her car in order to give him the opportunity to help her escape and encourage her to trust him?
• Politically Incorrect Villain:
  • Ransom smugly calls Meg an "SJW" just for attending college for an unspecified degree rumored to be useless, is rude to and willing to kill the lower-class employee Fran, and says he doesn't want the Latina Marta to inherit his (all white) family's "ancestral home" (which his grandfather only purchased from a Pakistani real estate owner in the 1980s). Ultimately, though, his motivation was based purely on wanting a cut of Harlan's inheritance and making sure that Marta got none of it, so it's clear that greed wasn't the only factor at work.
  • All the living adults in the Thrombey clan have a streak of this, bluntly debating immigration issues in front of Marta, regularly patronizing her, and later blackmailing her with her mother's undocumented status to get Harlan's inheritance. Walt even tells Marta that, if she gives the money back to the Thrombeys, they will use their wealth to help Marta's mother become documented, clearly assuming she is too stupid to use the money that way herself.
  • Jacob is regularly referred to as an "alt-right troll" and a "Nazi", which all seems to be true, but ultimately he has nothing to do with the murder.
  • Derogatory language and slurs against Marta abound, such as when they call her a whore when they discover Harlan's will.
• Precision F-Strike: Uttered twice. Once by Richard ("Who the fuck is he?" when he first sees Blanc), then by Ransom ("Fuck my family").
  • Also, after Ransom realizes he used a prop knife to try and murder Marta after she made him confess to Fran's murder.
    "Shit."
• Product Placement:
  • Walt tells Harlan that Netflix is interested in licensing his books.
  • After throwing up, Marta tells Blanc that she wants to get Scope (mouthwash).
  • Fran tells Meg that she has given up smoking weed since Meg bought her a Juul e-cigarette.
  • During his first scene Ransom is eating Lotus Biscoff cookies, with some prominence.

Q to Z

• Rage Breaking Point: Marta for the movie has been scared, nervous or guilty about her involvement with Harlan's death. Then she learns that Ransom tried to kill Harlan and did kill Fran. Without raising her voice, on getting the call from the hospital that Fran died, she calmly lies to Ransom that Fran is alive to testify, provoking Ransom into Evil Gloating. After she vomits all over him, Marta calmly but angrily reveals that Ransom confessed to her murder.
• "Rashomon"-Style:
  • When the police interview Linda and she waxes lyrical about how close she was with her father, we see a flashback of the birthday cake with Linda and her husband at Harlan's side. When they interview Walt and he waxes lyrical, we see the same flashback, but this time Walt and his family are at his father's side. Clearly one or both are lying, but we never find out which one.
  • Similarly, when Linda recalls Ransom storming out of the party, he stops to give Great-Nana a loving pat on the shoulder on his way out the door. When Marta remembers the same event, Ransom stomps right past Great-Nana without even a glance her way.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Blanc gets in a beauty of one when Marta says that the family has always treated her well (when they really haven't) and they smugly accept it, just after he reads the toxicology report that proves Harlan wasn't poisoned. His speech prevents Marta from confessing to wrongfully killing Harlan when she did not.
  Blanc: Excuse me! You have not been good to her. You have all treated her like shit, to steal back a fortune that you lost, and she deserves. You're a pack of vultures at the feast; knives out, beaks bloody! Well, you're not getting bailed out, not this time. Miss Cabrera has decided, definitively, not to renounce the inheritance.
• Red Herring: Early on after Harlan kills himself to cover up Marta's accidental poisoning of him, we see a drop of blood on her shoe. It never comes up until the very end after the police have arrested the true killer (well, mastermind) when Blanc reveals that he knew she had a connection to Harlan's death because of it, but never brought it up as he needed to see how she tampered with the evidence (and uncover the truth).
• Reverse Whodunnit: Played with. After Marta's Flashback, the film shifts to this as Marta desperately tries to cover her tracks. Of course, it turns back into a regular Whodunnit once we discover that Marta only thinks she killed Harlan.
• Revealing Cover-Up: What lands Ransom in jail. Had he not attempted to cover his tracks by killing Fran and trying one last effort to frame Marta, he would have at best avoided any consequence from his actions and at worst needed to only deal with minor crimes that he claims he can easily get out of with his lawyers. Instead, his actions escalate his crimes to attempted murder, then to straight-up murder, and capped off after his confession was obtained with an attempted murder in front of the police to seal the deal.
• Rewatch Bonus:
  • Most of Ransom's scenes, after we hear Blanc's summation.
  • Blanc's first scene with Marta has him look directly down at her shoes, proving that he knew she was at the crime scene at once.
• Right for the Wrong Reasons: The blackmailer's motivation plays into this. While she doesn't have the know-how to understand the contents of the toxicology report she obtained, Fran believes it validates her suspicion of Ransom tampering with Marta's medicine to kill Harlan, and threatens him with the header in a photocopy for an anonymous note. Fran is absolutely correct that the tox report damns Ransom, but not because Harlan was overdosed. It turns out, Ransom is undone by the tox report because it shows Marta still picked the correct medicine after reading the bottles and believing she had misdosed him with morphine and was guilty for his death. Her sure testimony and the tox report conflict and prove Ransom tampered with the medication after all...Marta just didn't read the labels and execute the intended overdose like Fran had believed.
• Rule of Three:
  • Once Marta's compulsive vomiting is set up, we see it happen three more times:
    • When she omits the truth to establish a false alibi.
    • When she lies about Ransom telling her to drive away from the police.
    • When she lies about Fran surviving in order to bait Ransom into a confession.
  • Someone climbs the creaky stairs to Harlan's study three separate times, waking up Linda, a light sleeper, during the flashback to the night of his death.
• Rules Lawyer: When Alan Stevens reveals that Harlan left everything to Marta, as the Thrombeys try to protest that Marta must have manipulated him somehow, Stevens casually counters that such an argument would never hold up in court as they have no evidence that Marta did anything to 'manipulate' Harlan beyond being a good nurse who did her job and served as a good friend to him.
• Running Gag:
  • None of the Thrombey family can remember which country Marta's family emigrated to the United States from, with Ecuador, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Brazil all referred to as her country of origin by different members. The audience isn't unambiguously told either.^note Brazil can be ruled out as she, her mother, and her sister speak in un-subtitled Spanish to each other. For the record, Ana de Armas was born and raised in Cuba, with Spanish ancestry and citizenship (her mother's parents were both from Spain); however, she uses neither accent for the part, and Marta's mother can't be Cuban because she would have gotten automatic residency upon reaching the US.. The one who suggests Brazil is Ransom, which shows he doesn't even register what she says enough to realize that it's not Portuguese.
  • The family members also routinely comfort Marta with the assurance that "we'll take care of you," that she is "part of the family," and that they wanted her at Harlan's funeral, but the others outvoted them, gradually making it clear none of them wanted her there.
• Rustproof Blood: The spot of blood on Marta's shoe remains visibly red for several days after Harlan's death, even though it should have turned brown, but that is so the audience can make the same deduction that Blanc (who would recognize even a faded, brown bloodstain due to his experience) made. Rian Johnson knows that blood turns brown since it is a plot point in his earlier film The Brothers Bloom.
• Saying Too Much:
  • In hindsight, Ransom fell victim to this when he told Marta that Harlan mentioned in their last conversation that Marta was the only person to beat Harlan at Go more regularly than Ransom did. As Harlan and Ransom's last conversation was about the will, that leads Blanc to the realization that Ransom knew the truth about the will as there was otherwise no reason for Harlan to bring up Marta's name in such a conversation.
  • Walt tries to force Marta's hand by threatening to expose Marta's mother as an illegal immigrant and have her deported. It might have worked had Walt not mentioned that the family would help Marta's mother with Harlan's resources if she renounced the inheritance. Instead, Marta says that since she now has his resources, she will help her mother by herself.
• Screw the Money, I Have Rules!:
  • Harlan forbids any adaptations of his novels, to the chagrin of Walt, who sees them as a gold mine waiting to tap. One flashback to Harlan's party shows him brushing off Walt as he tries to explain that Netflix is offering a healthy sum and that "the window is closing."
  • In the climax Marta is ready to confess that she killed Harlan, forfeiting her inheritance from him and her family's place in America until Blanc interrupts her.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: Richard Drysdale, as seen during Ransom's arrest, seems to be under the impression that bribery involves waving a wad of cash at an arresting officer while yelling and hoping he takes it. The police officer does not. If anything, Richard is lucky none of the cops take him seriously as even attempting to bribe a police officer is a federal offense and he's doing this with plenty of witnesses.
• Self-Serving Memory:
  • Both Linda and Walt have identical flashbacks of their family (those who were present at Harlan's party, anyway) surrounding Harlan when presenting his cake to show how close they were to him. It is unclear which flashback is correct if either of them was in the first place.
  • Richard, when talking to the police about Marta, flashes back to the party, as he warmly beckons her over to the cheerfully partying guests, whom she joins eagerly. A more extended flashback later reveals that he summoned her to use as a prop for his racist argument in a heated debate and she was extremely uncomfortable the whole time.
• Senseless Sacrifice: Harlan's suicide was meant to protect Marta, who gave him a lethal dosage of the wrong medicine by accident...and then later, we learn it was not so accidental since Ransom switched the contents of her bottles to make her commit the error and cost her her inheritance. In the end, though, it turns out Ransom's manipulations only made Marta think she overdosed Harlan—her nursing instincts led her to choose the correct medicine without reading the labels until after the first dosage, meaning she didn't overdose Harlan and Ransom didn't succeed in using her to kill him. Harlan killed himself to protect her, but he and Marta were both wrong in thinking he was dying in the first place. Had he let her call an ambulance, he would have been found properly dosed and safe and Ransom would have been caught sooner after Marta realized her kit was tampered with.
• Shout-Out:
  • The name of the victim, Harlan Thrombey, is a shout-out to the Choose Your Own Adventure detective story Who Killed Harlowe Thrombey? Mr. Proofroc, the security guard, is also named after Mr. Prufrock, the lawyer featured in the same detective story.
  • Harlan being a famous mystery writer could be a shout-out to author Harlan Coben.
  • Ransom takes his name after the protagonist of C. S. Lewis' Space Trilogy.
  • During the car chase scene, Ransom refers to Marta as "Baby Driver", a reference to another, similarly tightly plotted film. Reportedly, Rian Johnson had originally planned on a much more conventional and exciting car chase for this scene, but after seeing that movie, he realized he wouldn't be able to compete with its truly spectacular car chases, and opted instead for a comedically-anticlimactic Low-Speed Chase.
  • Trooper Wagner comments that the grainy black-and-white security footage of Harlan's driveway looks like a Japanese horror movie and jokingly asks if they will die seven days after watching it.
  • As explicated below under Titled After the Song, the film takes its name after a Radiohead song.
  • Thrombey's arrangement of knives (well, at least one is a prop) may be a reference to the Iron Throne from Game of Thrones. Both pieces of media showcase a community (the Thrombey family and the court of Westeros, plus the royal family with its multitude of issues) falling apart after the death of a patriarch who rose from humble beginnings (Harlan Thrombey made his fortune as a writer, Robert Baratheon, while a lord's son, got to the throne by becoming a fearsome commander and overthrowing a tyrant).
  • Blanc cites Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (specifically, the title's description of how objects fall to earth) as a metaphor for how he solves his cases. Although Blanc claims that no one has ever actually read Pynchon's novel, writer/director Rian Johnson has in fact read it. Twice. The film subtly reflects this in within the narrative structure of the plot, though they do not have thematic elements in common. The rocket models on Thrombey's shelves are a direct reference to Gravity's Rainbow, which opens with a description of a V-2 rocket flying to earth (and closes with a rocket destroying the text of the novel itself ... possibly). Johnson also acknowledged Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 and Vineland as direct inspirations on the plot, with the former centering around the execution of a will and ending on an ambiguous note, and the latter revolving around a Big, Screwed-Up Family.
  • Blanc's surname echoes the color-themed character names of Clue. Carried further in the promotional images, which depict all the characters dressed in block colors. In the film itself, Lt. Elliot derisively refers to the Thrombey estate as a "Clue board." The syllables of his name also have a similar pattern to those of "Sherlock Holmes".
  • In one scene, Marta turns on the bathroom faucet and kneels in front of the toilet to heave. Writer/director Rian Johnson directed three episodes of a certain show on which two different characters performed this ritual.
    • Johnson also attributes the shot from the underside of Marta's gas pedal to Breaking Bad, claiming that working on the show taught him how to make something so simple visually dynamic.
  • During the early questioning sessions, Richard talks about how much he admires Marta, then quips, "Immigrants, we get the job done." After a Beat he adds, "Hamilton."
  • When Blanc invites Marta to act as his assistant for the investigation, he finishes, "So, how about it, Watson?" And later, after find an important clue, he remarks, "The game is afoot, eh, Watson?"
• Silent Whisper: At the beginning of The Summation scene, Blanc whispers instructions to Trooper Wagner. The audience does not hear what he says and only finds out what the instructions were at the same time the other characters do.
• Skewed Priorities:
  • Blanc, to the chagrin of the police, seems more interested in figuring out who hired him to solve the mystery than uncovering what happened to Harlan Thrombey. This ultimately leads to solving the case as it was the one detail that had no explanation.
  • Harlan's reaction to learning he's overdosed on morphine is to question Marta about various medical details concerning death by morphine overdose, in order to take mental notes to potentially use it in a future novel. Of course, at this point he thinks that the mistake is reversible and that he will be fine.
  • Overlapping with Dramatically Missing the Point, after hearing Marta's story about what really happened to Harlan, the first thing Ransom has to say about it is that he thought he was the only one who could beat Harlan at Go.
• Slut-Shaming: When Harlan's will naming Marta as his sole inheritor is read, Linda goes ballistic and demands to know if Marta was "screwing him".
• Spanner in the Works:
  • Ransom, to a criminal degree. Once he learns Harlan is going to leave everything to Marta, he not only sabotages her med bag (leading to Harlan's death), he also anonymously hires Blanc to investigate, assuming his investigation will lead to Marta's incarceration and the nullification of the new will.
  • Marta ends up being this to Ransom's plan. He swapped Harlan's medicine around between the two bottles, expecting Marta to look at the bottle before administering it, but Marta was instinctively able to tell which medicine was which just from the color and viscosity of the liquid before realizing that she gave him the "wrong" medicine, thus making her 100% innocent of causing his death. This causes him to have to change his plans completely.
  • Harlan also becomes a spanner to Ransom's plan to murder him. Rather than let Marta get indicted, he constructed an elaborate plot to give her an alibi. Ransom becomes genuinely bowled over when he interrogates Marta about it.
  • Fran turns out to be a spanner in Ransom's plan when she notices him entering the attic as Harlan's funeral is going on.
  • Great-Nana is a spanner in both Ransom's plan and Marta's, since she spots both of them climbing down the trellis on the night of Harlan's death.
  • Benoit ends up being the ultimate spanner; Ransom hired him but underestimated that to a detective, it would seem Too Good to Be True that someone would want him to investigate a suicide in exchange for an envelope of cash. It seems like the anonymous client would have ulterior motives especially when that money is involved. He decides to take his time solving the case, rather than accuse Marta the minute he sees blood on her shoe, because instinct tells him that Marta is not a killer. It means that he pieces together exactly what Ransom did in the climax.
• Spotting the Thread: There are a lot of threads, and Blanc skillfuly spots them all, but one of the best is when he's in Harlan's study and deliberately knocks the Go board onto the carpet. Joni said she heard a noise and went upstairs to investigate, Harlan told her what she heard was the Go board being knocked onto the floor. When Blanc knocks the board over, it lands on the thick carpet with a very muffled sound that no one downstairs could have heard.
• Starts with a Suicide: Harlan's suicide kicks off the plot.
• Stylistic Suck: The mystery shows Marta's sister watches at the beginning of the movie has hilariously hammy dialog and appears to revolve around a ridiculously gruesome murder.
• The Summation: A remarkably straight example in the climax, where Blanc spells out to Marta and Ransom exactly what happened.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
  • In the beginning, Harlan invokes this when Marta tries to call 911 for him. Even though it was an accident, they will indict her for manslaughter since he is dead anyway. Then the narrative turns it on its head; Benoit says that Harlan should have listened to Marta because the paramedics would have realized Harlan received the right medicine and the investigation would have revealed that someone had tampered with her medical bag.
  • Harlan's elaborate plan to prevent Marta from being a suspect is straight out of a murder mystery. However, Marta is a civilian with Genre Blindness and no training, so there are inevitably snags in the execution (like forgetting when to turn so the cameras don't catch her and slipping on the trellis, causing a broken piece of wood), which she finds herself having to cover up when Blanc starts sniffing around. Harlan does acknowledge that his plan is going to meet unexpected hurdles. In a twist, these hurdles end up proving Marta's innocence, as she genuinely did not commit the crime.
    • Additionally, the lines Harlan feeds Marta to avoid her Cannot Tell a Lie problems only work for a brief time. The police inevitably have more questions, and her anxiety still causes her to vomit.
  • Marta shakes off the police temporarily by squeezing her smaller, underpowered car through a couple of choke points, but as soon as she pulls to a stop, they catch up with her. Though this turns out to help her, since getting hauled in for questioning at precisely that moment disrupts Ransom's scheme.
  • Fran the housekeeper gets hold of Harlan's toxicology report before Blanc does, but doesn't understand what it says due to having no police or medical training.
  • At one point, the true murderer is forced to confront their blackmailer alone in a secluded place with no witnesses nearby, which turns out to a terrible idea for the blackmailer, Fran, who didn't account for the possibility of Ransom just physically overpowering and killing her.
  • The family takes pride in Harlan's Big Fancy House and considers it their "ancestral" home. When Blanc hears this, he bursts out laughing and points out that Harlan has only owned it since the '80s, when he actually became wealthy from his novels. A true Self-Made Man like him would have never been able to live in such a place beforehand.
  • The Summation may be a quintessential part of a whodunnit, but in practice, confronting a known killer with the fact that they are definitively going to jail is a sure recipe get them to lash out violently. If Ransom had picked a real knife, he would have killed Marta.
    • Nobody, let alone a man as famous for writing mystery novels as Harlan would never be so foolish as to leave dozens of dangerous weapons out in the open where anyone could reach. The knives in his chair were props.
  • In the opening scene, housekeeper Fran comes across Harlan's body and gets about halfway through a Dramatic Drop before instinct catches up with her and she fumbles to catch the tray while cursing.
  • Benoit Blanc is less interested in digging up clues and evidence than the police, stating to Marta at one point that he's more interested in the overarching scope of the case. The police, in turn, indulge Benoit but state that without any evidence all he is doing is providing a theory with nothing to substantiate it. This comes to a head in the climax where Blanc correctly surmises the entirety of the case, but only has circumstantial evidence to go on which won't hold up in court. It takes Marta pulling an Engineered Public Confession on Ransom in order to get him to admit to his crimes, which is then recorded by the police, which then gives them cause to arrest him.
  • Marta indicates that despite the Thrombey family's various unsavory traits and obvious motivations, she doesn't think any of the main members would be willing to kill Harlan, and she is correct, it was Black Sheep Ransom. They are indeed a Big, Screwed-Up Family who have various issues with their patriarch, but it takes a lot to incite someone to murder anyone, let alone a family member, and it's surprisingly realistic that none of them have crossed the line.
  • Despite being injected with a lethal dose of morphine, Fran stays conscious just long enough to give Marta a vital clue as to who is responsible for her death. Because Ransom has no medical training, unlike Marta, he only managed to give Fran an intramuscular injection instead of an intravenous one, which means it took time for the morphine to get into Fran's bloodstream.
• Tag Line:
  • "A whodunnit like no one has ever dunnit."
  • Theatrical release poster: "Hell, any of them could have done it."
• Take That!:
  • Linda describing herself as "self-made" when she started her business with a million-dollar loan from her father is a very deliberate dig at a certain American political figure.
  • Jacob Thrombey being an "alt-right troll" is a willful jab at the wave of online harassers that went after Rian Johnson and the cast members of The Last Jedi.
  • Joni's holistic lifestyle brand, which promises vague concepts of well-being and has a pretentious, meaningless one-syllable name ("Flam") that Lt. Elliot clearly finds ridiculous, is a parody of Gwyneth Paltrow's brand Goop. Even the name itself suggests "flim-flam".
• Taking You with Me: Ransom attempts this upon Marta when he unwittingly admits to Fran's murder, grabbing a knife from the circular display and figuring that, if he's going to prison anyway, he might as well take out the one who laid him low. Subverted when he realizes that he had grabbed a trick knife instead of a real knife.
• Tempting Fate: During his summation, Blanc waxes on about how Fran survived Ransom's attempt to kill her and will testify against him, right before Marta gets the call about Fran from the hospital.
• Threat Backfire: Walt tries to intimidate Marta into giving up the money by threatening to have her mother deported and "only our lawyers and resources" could stop that. Marta points out that she now controls all the family's lawyers and resources and without Harlan's fortune, the family will be lucky to afford a half-decent lawyer to go against the firms Marta can now hire.
• Titled After the Song: Rian Johnson has confirmed that he named the film after the Radiohead song of the same name (from Amnesiac). The song does not have anything to do with the actual plot of the film, though; Johnson just liked the song and thought it had a great title for a whodunnit.
• Title Drop: Said by Blanc when describing how the Thrombeys are both like hungry vultures around their patriarch's corpse and quick to turn on one another ("Knives out, beaks bloodied!").
• Too Dumb to Live: As Benoit puts it, "Poor Fran." She finds out that Ransom tampered with Marta's medical bag and correctly deduces that he had something to do with Harlan's death. Rather than telling the police what she saw, she decides to send a blackmail note to Ransom with a photocopy of the top of the toxicology report. It is unclear if she meant to confront him dramatically or get money out of him, but either way, he knocks her out and overdoses her with morphine, planning to frame Marta for her death.
• Too Much Alike: During a flashback, Harlan mentions that one of Ransom's issues is that he is too much like Harlan. This is later confirmed when it is revealed that they independently improvised nearly identical plans on the spot to accomplish their goals: be seen leaving the house, turn around off-camera, return, climb the trellis, and get to Harlan's study through the hidden window.
• Tragic Keepsake: Harlan's coffee cup is this for Marta, as she is seen drinking from it in the very last scene of the movie.
• Trauma Conga Line: The film is an extended Break the Cutie for Marta. She accidentally administers the wrong dosage of medicine to her rich boss Harlan and it kills him. He encourages her to lie to save her from getting into hot water with authorities, then slashes himself in front of the already-distressed Marta. When the Thrombeys find out she inherited all of Harlan's assets, all of them turn against her, even the ones who seemed nice enough. She sees her co-worker Fran in a horrifying state of paralysis and near-death; she also mistakenly thinks Fran is blaming her for everything. Ransom also baits her into thinking she can trust him. He is the one behind the murders and framing Marta, who didn't even commit accidental murder because she was a sufficiently skilled nurse to have instinctively known the correct bottle to use despite Ransom switching them. No one could blame her after she ultimately maybe leaves the Thrombeys to fend for themselves.
• Undying Loyalty: Because Harlan treated them well, Fran and Marta cared deeply for him. So much that Marta reluctantly carried out his plan to create an alibi for herself, and Fran investigated on her own why Ransom was tampering with his grandfather's medicine.
• Unreliable Voiceover:
  • The witnesses (minus Marta) lie constantly to Blanc and the police, but the flashbacks always tell the truth — aside from minor details (see "Rashomon"-Style above).
  • We also hear from Richard during his interview that the Thrombeys all consider Marta a part of the family and a flashback to the party goes with this wherein we see Richard warmly inviting her over to join the rest of the family by the fireplace. However, when we later see this flashback play out again from Marta's perspective, we find out that Richard was cajoling her over to bolster a political argument he was making about "good immigrants" and "bad immigrants" and even that he considers her a servant as he holds out his empty plate to her while he talks.
• Vertigo Effect: The effect is used when Ransom attacks Marta with a knife after she tricks him into confessing to killing Fran.
• Video Credits: The end credits show each actor with a painted portrait of their character.
• Visual Pun: The trailer switches to somebody grabbing a real knife on the circular display after Benoit mentions that the family members "really love twisting the knife into one another."
• Vitriolic Best Buds: Marta and Harlan have this, oddly enough. In what little we glimpse of them alone together, Harlan gives her a tough time by flipping a Go table and needling her, with Marta giving as good as she gets; however, it is clear it is all good-natured, compared to Harlan's arguments with his true family. Marta states that the reason she got more hours working than needed as a nurse was that he needed a friend, as expected of a man with a Big, Screwed-Up Family.
• Vomit Discretion Shot: Played straight with Marta multiple times, but then subverted HARD when she vomits on Ransom at the end, on-screen.
• Warning Mistaken for Threat: Marta finds a morphine-overdosed Fran, who barely manages to wheeze out, "You did this... won't get away with it..." before losing consciousness. Marta, although she didn't hurt Fran, accepts the blame, since she thinks her covering up the true circumstances behind Harlan's death is what led to this. However, she later realizes, Fran was saying "Hugh did this," was trying to warn her.
• Wham Line: A variant, in that it is not this trope when first spoken, but becomes the trope when repeated in a flashback: "Ransom, are you back again already?" At first it does not seem too important that Wanetta has mistaken Marta for Ransom, but the Wham part is the word "again"—which, as Benoit Blanc explains, means that Ransom had returned to the house before Marta left, which puts him at the crime scene.
  • Before that, Blanc to Ransom: "You might tell us all why you hired me."
• What Happened to the Mouse?:
  • While the film ends open-ended on how everyone moves forward, Nana last appears laughing as Blanc states that none of the Thrombeys is getting a red cent of their patriarch's inheritance. Is she going to a nursing home? Is the family going to take care of her? Will Marta look after her now? Who knows?
  • When Harlan receives an injection of what he thinks is a lethal dose of morphine he thinks it is a good plot for a murder mystery and jots it down. What happens to the journal never appears again, though if the detectives who searched the crime scene found it, his last entry would certainly have given them, or Benoit Blanc, pause for thought. Regardless, the toxicology report would completely rule out morphine overdose and clear Marta's connection to the journal.
• What You Are in the Dark:
  • Harlan is remarkable when trying to help his Only Friend Marta. He forcibly makes Marta hang up the phone and proves he would rather die than see her indicted for manslaughter by slashing his throat before she can convince him to change his mind. For all his flaws, he was fiercely loyal.
  • Ransom fails this. He learns from Harlan that the man is going to disinherit the family and leave everything to Marta. Rather than tell his family members, he concocts an elaborate plot to ensure that Marta cannot inherit and his family does instead.
  • Fran, bless her heart, fails this. She noticed Ransom tampering with Marta's medical bag and, on a hunch, asked her cousin who works for the CME for a copy of Harlan's toxicology report. Even though the numbers meant nothing to her, she thought it would be a clever idea to confront Ransom and confirm he did try to frame Marta by killing Harlan. And she made sure to store a backup copy and tell Marta while dying.
  • Benoit knew from the start that Marta was involved in whatever happened to Harlan. Instead of confronting her, he employs her as an unofficial assistant because instinct told him that Marta was not a killer. Even though it wasn't any of his business, he stops Marta from giving up the fortune and calls the family out for how they treated her, once he realizes she's innocent.
  • Fran seemingly has proof Marta killed Harlan, and Marta can leave her to die and get out of trouble or save her and likely go to jail and risk her mother's deportation. Marta chooses to help and becomes rewarded for it when it turns out Fran instead has proof of her innocence. Significantly, this scene is set in a dark and secluded area.
  • Linda during questioning. She notices that Benoit is baiting her with a remark about "all of the Thrombeys being self-made", to say what she really felt and thought about Walt, who was "only administering" the publishing house and not making film or TV deals. She gets angry at him and pointedly closes ranks by refusing to run the risk of incriminating her brother. Her husband, on the other hand...
• Whodunnit: Deconstructed and reconstructed. We know the circumstances of Harlan's death well before the end of the film, and the detectives shrug off potential motives as too weak for murder (motives that are commonly true in other whodunnits). That said, the mystery of who hired Benoit is a Fair-Play Whodunnit.
• Who Would Be Stupid Enough?: A variation; Linda sees right through Benoit's attempts to bait her into talking badly about Walt, and angrily berates him for thinking that she would be stupid enough to fall for such an obvious ploy. Cut mid-sentence to her husband Richard proving that he is exactly stupid enough to fall for that one.
• Whole-Plot Reference:
  • The setup (though not the solution to the mystery) bears substantial similarities to Agatha Christie's Crooked House and its 2017 film adaptation: the patriarch of a Big, Screwed-Up Family is murdered by Medication Tampering; the family members (including a son who manages the father's business) are all present in the Big Fancy House, have all recently had a conflict with the patriarch and are all suspects; there is a surprise change to the patriarch's will affecting who stands to inherit his wealth; the and the second victim is one of the household staff.
  • The setup, however, bears a notable resemblance to Black Coffee — the wealthy, eccentric patriarch of a family has died, in a poisoning incident that seems to be an Open-and-Shut Case against the main female lead.
• Who's on First?: Played for Drama. Marta initially thinks that Fran is telling her "You did this" while on the verge of death. She realizes during The Summation that Fran was saying "Hugh did this" — as in, Hugh Ransom Drysdale, who made the help call him by his first name.
• Wimp Fight: Richard and Walter challenge each other to a fight but both men being pathetic, just wind up slapping each other until their female family members break it up.
• Wiper Start: After reading the will, Marta rushes out of the house; pursued and badgered by the Thrombey family. She jumps in her car but is so flustered that she cannot get it started. She does, however, turn on the wipers.
• Wrong Assumption: Both Ransom and Fran assume the toxicology report reveals that Harlan was given a massive morphine overdose. In fact, the toxicology came back clean because Marta gave Harlan the correct medication even though Ransom switched the contents of the vials. When Ransom first receives the blackmail, he is confused and unbothered because he believes the omitted contents of the photocopied tox report support his setup and will condemn Marta, but after he hears her version of events, he realizes she foiled his plan by accident and that the full tox report instead proves her innocent and him guilty. After this, he forwards the vague blackmail to Marta to make her see the report as a threat to her, which works since the data is not included.
• Xanatos Gambit: While framing Marta seems to have been Ransom's Plan A, midway through the film he makes a deal with her to receive his share of the inheritance if he helps her cover up her guilt.
• Xanatos Speed Chess: Ransom's plan fails almost immediately but he continues manipulating Marta and trying to salvage his plan. He does a decent job and would have succeeded had he not completely misread Marta's character.
• You Are Better Than You Think You Are: After feeling immense guilt for Harlan's death in addition to getting lots of hate from the Thrombeys for most of the movie, Marta is told by Blanc during The Summation that the only thing she was guilty of is being a good nurse, as she didn't actually kill Harlan. Moreover, he said she beat Ransom because she refused to play his game.
• You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!: Line said by Marta when Harlan explains that she must climb the wall of the house and enter via the trick window.
• Your Television Hates You: Every time Marta goes home, somebody is watching a murder mystery on TV.

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"A twisted web, and we are not finished untangling it. Not yet."

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