A Murder Most Foul

Rian Johnson is not someone I wouldn’t normally pick out to direct a big budget Hollywood film. The director goes for deconstructed stories. He got his start with the film Brick, a hard-boiled, neo-noir film set, of all places, in a high school. And it works. Brick is a fantastic movie, and he followed it with a rom-com about con men, The Brothers Bloom, and then a twisty, time travel story that kept reinventing it’s tale as you watched it, Looper. It’s that film, Looper, that likely got Johnson the gig directing the eighth Star WarsThe modern blockbuster: it's a concept so commonplace now we don't even think about the fact that before the end of the 1970s, this kind of movie -- huge spectacles, big action, massive budgets -- wasn't really made. That all changed, though, with Star Wars, a series of films that were big on spectacle (and even bigger on profits). A hero's journey set against a sci-fi backdrop, nothing like this series had ever really been done before, and then Hollywood was never the same. film, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, but it, and everything he directed before, should have been a big warning flag to Disney that Johnson was going to do his own thing with the franchise.

Look, I like The Last Jedi, and I recognize I’m probably in the minority of viewers that did. I liked it specifically because it wasn’t your usual Star Wars film, and that it tried to play around with conventions to make something interesting and unusual. That’s Johnson’s bag. Fans hated it, with the hardest of hardcore lambasting the film all over the web. But honestly, it’s exactly the kind of film Johnson was going to make in Star Wars and no one should have been shocked. And then he followed it up with Knives Out, which is exactly the kind of potboiler detective story you’d expect from Johnson, all things considered.

Knives Out is a brilliant film, but it’s a mistake to call it specifically a murder mystery. From the outset it tells you exactly what happened and what’s going on. And then it reinvents itself, and then reinvents itself again. At some point in the middle of it all it does become a murder mystery, but not for the reasons presented initially, and not in any way you expect. Knives Out is very much an Agatha Christie-style detective story, complete with a smarter than everyone else in the room detective that can’t be fooled, but it’s the kind of story she would have written if she’d grown completely bored with all of her works and wanted to write something that complete deconstructed everyone one of her tales at once. It is, in short, a brilliant mystery that keeps you guessing because it’s never the film you think it is.

We open with a murder. Well, a suicide. But maybe a murder. Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer), the 85 year old world famous author, is dead. Found by his housekeeper, Fran (Edi Patterson), Thrombey’s death is an apparent suicide, the knife in his hand, he the only one in the room. As his family gathers together – daughter Linda Drysdale (Jamie Lee Curtis) and her husband Richard (Don Johnson), son Walt Thrombey (Michael Shannon) and his wife Donna (Riki Lindhome), and Joni Thrombey (Toni Collette), widow of deceased son Neil, plus grandkids Jacob (Jaeden Martell), Meg (Katherine Langford), and Ransom (Chris Evans) – for the eventual reading of the will, two police detectives, Detective Lieutenant Elliott (LaKeith Stanfield) and Trooper Wagner (LaKeith Stanfield), have just a few more questions for the assembled members.

Well, two detectives plus a private investigator, Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig). As we learn, Blanc is a detective of some renown and someone, quite mysteriously, hired him to look into this whole case, raising questions of foul play. Many of the family members have potential reasons for wanting Harlan dead. Harlan knew Richard was cheating on Linda and threatened to expose the relationship. Walt was getting cut out of the family publishing business, being shoved off to find his own way in the world. Ransom was cut off entirely, written out of the will. And then there’s Harlan’s nurse, Marta Cabrera (Ana de Armas), who’s been with Harlan for a while now and was probably his one, true friend. She, as it turns out, is the sole heir to the Thrombey fortune, a shocking turn of events. And if there were any suspicion that she had something to do with his death, well that fortune would be forfeit. What could have happened, and was it really a murder most foul?

The thing about Knives Out’s mystery is that it builds. It’s never a clear cut mystery from start to finish. The movie opens with a party for the whole family, celebrating Harlan’s birthday. We meet the various players, we get hints as to the various points of tension in the family, and we get to see them all acting like rich, entitled pricks. All except for Marta, who effectively becomes our main character. Once the party is over and Harlan goes up to his room, with Marta’s assistance, we learn the details of what happened that night. Marta gave Harlan his medicine, there was a mix up with the bottles, and she accidentally poisoned him. So Harlan, to save her from prison and who knows what else, kills himself to cover the tracks. That sets up the real story of the film, which isn’t a whodunit but a will-she-get-caught?

Except that’s not even the real case. Blanc, as he picks and pulls and tears apart the case, finds more and more details that don’t quite add up. It could be that he’s narrowing in on Marta’s involvement, or it could be that he’s finding other factors that might swing the case in another direction. We in the audience don’t know, and as everything unfolds, the story gets twistier and twistier. The real trick is that even though Johnson gives us the whole case right in front of us, letting us know it was a suicide and not a murder, we’re still in the position to question everything. He reverses the formula and still manages to give us a tense and taut murder mystery all the same. It’s amazing.

Much of the credit is due to Johnson’s script, which provides us with a whole host of colorful characters. Each of the family members has a secret, is hiding something, and has their own motives for everything. They’re a cold, cruel bunch of vultures, all feeding off of Harlan’s good will and vast fortune. They’re all greedy and needy users, and as the film plays out we learn more and more about all of them. And yet, at the same time, Johnson keeps it light, even funny, playing the script just right to keep us engaged the whole time.

The cast helps this, of course, with stellar performances from so many. The star of the show is Daniel Craig, putting on (as one character puts it) one hell of a Foghorn Leghorn accent as he southern-charms his way through the whole case. Craig is absolutely lost in the role, and is amazing in every scene he’s in. Armas is also fantastic, giving Marta the sweetness and innocence she needs so that even as we know she was complicit in Harlan’s death we still want her to succeed. The fact that Harlan kills himself to cover for her helps, but it wouldn’t be the same if we didn’t like Marta. Plummer is great for his few scenes as Harlan, a cranky old coot with a heart of gold, played to perfection. And Evans is fantastic as Random, playing the kind of slick and smarmy character he used to portray before he became Captain AmericaCreated by Simon and Kirby in 1941, Captain America was a super soldier created to fight Germany and the evil HYDRA. Then he was lost in the ice, only to be found and reborn decades later as the great symbol of the USA.. It’s his kind of role, but the movie uses what we know of him as America’s defender to treat it as an against type performance.

But it’s the fact that the movie tricks us, and then keeps tricking us, over and over, that makes it work so well. We’re never quite certain what the case is, in part because we know that Harlan killed himself and yet the case goes on. But we also have to deal with the perspective of events as recounted by each character. Everyone gives their great performances, everyone has their unreliable narrators, everyone is hiding something. The film keeps toying with us, keeping us engaged and interested as it twists back over on itself again.

Johnson has a knack for this, skill at making twisty mystery deconstructions. It’s his gift, and he’s better at it than practically any other writer working in Hollywood today. And people love what he does, which is why he already got to make a sequel, Glass Onion, with a third, Wake Up Dead Man, on the way. Plus he has his Peacock TV series, Poker Face, and I’m sure even more mysteries percolating in his brain. Rian Johnson is a master of this craft, and I’m going to show up for his works any time he has a new one out. Knives Out earned that trust, and so far he hasn’t failed me yet.