Film I'd be a bigger mystery fan if THIS was what the genre was.
What the- how- oh no-whooooaaaa...
Yeah, this movie keeps you on your toes like very little else.
Harlan Thrombey is a rich old mystery novelist who "practically lives in a Clue board" of a house, and is found dead holding the knife that slit his throat. Despite this being an open-and-shut suicide, detective Benoit Blanc has been summoned to the scene to probe further into the death. There, we meet the dislikable members of his family who are politically varied representatives of privilege.
Mysteries work by revealing everything that happened at the end. With mystery films, that's not as effective because with a controlled runtime, the audience isn't really given the space to work it out for themselves. Knives Out runs a different strategy— repeatedly appear to tell the audience everything that's going on with huge swerves until the end reveals the final layers on top of all the insane shit that's already been disclosed to the audience. It's a WILD ride and masterfully keeps you on your toes. The narrative turns are so huge you wonder why the film thinks it's prudent to disclose them already, and the character dynamics become so gripping that the film successfully rides on a policy of telling the audience a lot a lot rather than slowly unfolding. It feels like the movie is always topping itself, yet there are still surprises ahead.
The turns manage to be both emotionally agonizing and emotionally satisfying, without it being an angsty film. Finding out the answers isn't just an exciting intellectual revelation, but it makes you very happy with where it places the characters. It's easy to take mysteries as puzzles and clinical cases, but this film invests in humanity and makes its stakes and answer a lot more powerful for how the people turn out for it.
The cast is great. The Thrombey family are mostly caricatures, but all rooted in something real and often entertainingly so, while Blanc is a Southern detective whose competence feels dubious until it might not be. The film's best trick is not making Blanc the protagonist or POV character so we're able to connect to the mystery through more personal terms of the entangled people—we're not left picking this apart from outside, and I hope that even as Blanc carries the sequels, he'll stay to the side for this reason. Still, Blanc himself isn't a detached jerk who only does it for the game. He stands up to injustice for the right reasons and plays his investigation with human care.
The film's themes skewer whiteness and privilege with the motivations of the characters, and uses class and race well as an underpinning commentary without speaking over the oppressed it stands up for.
This is the kind of movie I'd love to talk about, but responsibly cannot talk about. It's a fantastic empathetic mystery that shocked me with how much it tells the viewer without giving the game away.
Film Better than I expected (vague spoilers)
When I first heard about this film, everyone was talking about how it's a film by Rian Johnson. You know, the guy who did that Star Wars movie? The movie I thought was terribly plotted with poorly written characters and motivation, and a Broken Aesop to boot? Oh. I looked him up and found out that he did Looper too - a film that tried (poorly) to tell a simple story in a complex way and ended up tripping on itself.
So I was quite reluctant to watch this movie. The director/writer has been zero for two in my book.
Sufficed to say, I was delightfully surprised at this movie after finally getting around to it. It's got layers, like an onion - or, as the movie would describe it, a donut with a tinier donut inside the hole.
It throws you for a bit of a loop, especially if you forgot or didn't notice the details at the beginning - like a good whodunit story should. You think the mystery's solved, but then there's one thing that doesn't quite fit, and so on.
What actually took me by surprise was the tonal shift the movie takes. At first, it's just a basic crime investigation. Then it shifts somewhat and feels more like a heist movie. Then it shifts back to being a mystery again. It even does a good job of shifting back and forth who you feel you should be rooting for, somewhat, as you learn more and more about each character.
Overall, a great movie. 8/10. Nothing at all like Looper or The Last Jedi.
Film Now looka, I say, looka here!
Whereas the recent Murder on the Orient Express attempts to revitalise the classic whodunit story, Knives Out is by far the more accurate and effective pastiche. Nowadays modern movie and television demands there has to be some major emotional journey for the detective to follow (Orient Express, the Sherlock series), to the point where it overshadows the actual mystery plot. Knives Out is resolutely old fashioned, and by being so, is surprisingly refreshing. Finally we have a movie that ignores all of that nonsense and focuses on the mystery; the thing we're actually here for.
Specifically, the story starts with the mysterious circumstances of the death of Hanlan, an eccentric and fabulously wealthy murder mystery writer. His mansion is full of dysfunctional relatives and hangers-on, each with their own claim to Hanlan's wealth. Knives Out wears its influences on its sleeves: one character describes Hanlan's mansion as "the Clue House", and other characters dip into episodes of Murder She Wrote. No one calls Daniel Craig's detective "Poirot", but they might as well; he's the Kentucky version of the character, albeit with more accent and less moustache.
Whilst Craig and the other big name actors are poised to steal the show, Ana De Armas turns out to be the stealth protagonist, turning in a performance as the hapless former nurse to Hanlan. Much of the story is built around a peculiar physical quirk of hers that puts her front and centre of the murder case, and keeps her in constant jeopardy. To say more would be spoiling, but suffice to say she is the real star. Then there's the mansion, which is a character in-and-of itself, crammed to the rafters with sculptures and secrets. In the centre is a giant knife sculpture that might as well have been signed by Anton Chekhov.
I had a lot of fun with Knives Out. It's a silly and humble movie that's well worth the price of admission. Also, unlike - again - Murder on the Orient Express which blatantly cheats, Knives has a functional mystery that you are invited to figure out for yourself. I even managed to get about half of it right, so you should give the movie a try and see if you can do better.
Film A hearty recommendation
So, to start out, I first heard about this film from a critic I have learned to trust. And I was immediately turned off when he said that big chunks of the film are driven by a fake-out twist that isn't nearly as clever as the film thinks it is. I only went to see it at all because I wanted to take my brother, my grandfather, and several friends I'd reunited with for the holidays out to the movies, and when Ford v. Ferrari had left theaters this was the one everyone agreed they wanted to see.
I should've listened harder when that critic ultimately recommended it.
Now, to be clear, that fake-out twist is there, and it isn't as clever as the film thinks it is, but neither it nor other attempts to be cute (Oh man! A murder mystery writer murdered in a way straight out of a murder mystery! Columbo totally didn't do that... decades ago... twice.) have that intolerable, overpowering whiff of smugness I often get from other media that isn't as clever as it thinks it's being.
It does a good job of presenting the typical whodunnit dysfunctional family cast, but unlike some others in the genre (Crooked House, which shares more than a little with this film, springs to mind), their portrayal, while merciless, is also almost affectionate rather than purely cutting. And while it does get a bit more topical and a bit less timeless than I'd like, it at least skillfully uses these things to establish characterization rather than to "just" score relevancy points. Plus, the script pops with wit and actual cleverness throughout, with actually rather funny lines and subtle details that enhance characterization.
Oh, and the nuts-and-bolts filmmaking is excellent. A great cast of great actors who all "get" their eccentric characters very well, and a number of subtle cinematographic touches that pay close attention to mood and atmosphere. I don't know why Daniel Craig loves doing Southern accents so much, but at least he can actually act while affecting one.
Furthermore, that fake-out twist actually conceals the fairly clever mystery underneath. I was able to figure out the culprit and some parts of the ongoing events (at least partly through knowledge of the genre rather than clues on-screen, though also with clues on-screen) just by watching and thinking before film's end, but when the parlor scene hit, there were a number of smart details that lined up I realized I'd missed.
I guess that's why I will heartily recommend the film without reservation. Because it's not unbearably smug when it's trying and failing to be clever, and it's incredibly entertaining when it's just actually being clever.
Film Subverting Expectations Again (Late-Arrival Spoiler Warning)
Ugh. I should probably disclaim that my experience with this movie was spoiled when, in the middle of the big reveal moment, I had to leave the theater due to something important. Yes, I was forced to leave at the worst possible time. I saw the rest later in a YouTube clip. But as for the movie itself.
Between this film and The Last Jedi, I think I see some tropes favored by Rian Johnson: twists for the sake of being surprising, the Jerk with a Heart of Jerk, an authority figure who looks like a self-righteous idiot whether or not they were meant to, and moralizing just barely heavy-handed enough to be grating. In fairness, some of these aspects are more tolerable in a whodunnit mystery than in an epic space opera. But the movie also... um... "subverts expectations" in ways that end up working against it.
The story is kicked off by the death of wealthy mystery author Harlan Thrombey, and Gentleman Detective Benoit Blanc investigates the scene amidst the inevitable Big, Screwed-Up Family shenanigans that ensue. Where the film first takes a left turn from usual mystery convention is that Blanc is a Decoy Protagonist for Harlan's nurse Marta. This leads to a movie more focused on characters than mystery than may be expected.
The second curveball is that Harlan's grandson Ransom who appears to be a Jerk with a Heart of Gold... is actually the villain. So he turns out to be a selfish, hypocritical, Idle Rich racist... just like the rest of his family. The result is that by contrast Marta, the Latina daughter of an illegal immigrant, comes off as something of an absurdly pure and righteous protagonist who literally vomits at the notion of deceit, and inherits Harlan's entire fortune over all of his children because of her good, responsible heart. A patronizing "good immigrant" narrative, as the Unfortunate Implications entry currently describes it. Harlan comes off as an idiot who screwed up his own family and in doing so kicked off the lethally dangerous conflict; the movie's saving grace is that I suspect this might have been the intended audience reaction to him.
In typical mystery fashion, the final twist is revealed in a lengthy explanation at the end that relies on several long coincidences. This film is twisty and entertaining enough in its own right, but the more I reflect on it, the less I get out of it. My main takeaway is that it's another prime example of how being surprising and subversive isn't the same thing as being smart or worth thinking more about.
Honestly, I'm probably just salty about having to leave the theater.