I love a good whodunit. I’m a big fan of Agatha Christie’s novels, Clue is one of my all-time favorite movies and the idea of a bunch of rich people sitting around a parlor and drinking brandy as they are systematically bumped-off just speaks to me for some reason. What the fuck is a parlor, anyway? Is it just what rich people call a living room? But I digress…. anyway, Knives Out is a damn good entry in the genre. With a solid cast, sharp writing and an interesting approach to the mystery, this is a fun, well-made flick that I hope will spawn a series.
A wealthy mystery novelist invites his eccentric family to his mansion to celebrate his birthday. The following morning, he is found dead of an apparent suicide. The police are joined in the investigation by a private detective that has been anonymously hired by someone that doesn’t think that the suicide was actually a suicide. I just spent about ten minutes trying to work an Epstein joke into that last sentence, but I’ve got nothing.
This has all of the classic whodunit elements: a giant mansion with hidden passageways, a group of weird suspects in a relatively confined space, a quirky detective, etc. Yes, these are all clichés, but I don’t really care because this movie does them well. As will all good movie mysteries, one of the big selling points here is the cast. In the tradition of movies like Death on the Nile and Murder on the Orient Express (both versions), Knives Out features a lot of big names hamming it up like Colonel Mustard, including Daniel Craig as the detective, Jamie Lee Curtis, Chris Evans, Christopher Plummer, Toni Collette, Michael Shannon, M. Emmet Walsh and even Don Johnson (yes, the Miami Vice guy). All of them seem to be having a genuinely good time being in this kind of movie, but extra points go to Daniel Craig’s southern-fried performance as Benoit Blanc. Craig seems to be trying to put an American spin on the classic English detective character, like Hercule Poirot by way of the Kentucky Derby, and he is entertaining as hell in the part. The lead part is played by Ana de Armas in her debut in an American film, and she ably carries the narrative even while she is surrounded by much more established actors in smaller parts. I was quite impressed by her and Daniel Craig must have felt the same way; we will next be seeing her as the female lead in the next Bond movie.
I’m going to talk about the mystery itself, but no spoilers. The structure of the mystery here is a bit unusual and that might turn off some people, but I dug it. Basically, we find out what happened fairly early on in the movie, or at least we find out mostly what happened, but there are additional details to deduce that add additional twists to the events that we already know. It’s an interesting take on the typical structure of a whodunit that manages to bring something new to the table without overhauling any of the core elements of the genre. If I have a quibble, its that the movie emphasizes a key clue early on and, in doing so, makes the mystery far easier to solve (or come close to solving) than it should have.
If any of this is hard to follow, it’s because it is damn difficult to discuss the plot of a mystery without mentioning details and potential spoilers. This is a movie that you should see and then we’ll talk about it, because that’s part of the fun of this kind of story. I had lost interest in director Rian Johnson after he made my least favorite Star Wars movie (The Last Jedi), but he has redeemed himself with this fun, witty, old-fashioned entry into a genre that I love and I hope this isn’t Daniel Craig’s last time playing this character. Check out Knives Out in a theater.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knives_Out#/media/File:Knives_Out_poster.jpeg
