Movie Review: Rian Johnson’s 'Dunnit' Again With the Wicked "Knives Out"

Don’t fear: No spoilers here. All you need to know is Knives Out is a devilish delight.

The whodunnit Knives Out, not necessarily named after the fan reaction to writer-director Rian Johnson’s Star Wars: The Last Jedi, is all about an affluent family being questioned over the mysterious suicide of their patriarch, a crime novelist.

Christopher Plummer plays the dead author, Harlan Thrombey, though thankfully only in flashback on his 85th birthday, sparing Plummer from having to spend the entire flick on his back in rictus.

Jamie Lee Curtis, Michael Shannon, Don Johnson, Toni Collette and Riki Lindhome star as Thrombey’s no-good kids and their parasitic partners, while Chris Evans, Katherine Langford and Jaeden Martell appear as his even less-good grandkids. Ana de Armas is Harlan’s devoted nurse. Edi Patterson is the caretaker of his ornate, seemingly crime-friendly mansion, which comes replete with trick doors and everything. K Callan plays Harlan’s mother, who’s probably older and ricketier than the house.

And then there’s Lakeith Stanfield and Noah Segan as the cops, who were happy to rule Thrombey’s death an open-and-shut case of fatal self-harm, and Daniel Craig as the private detective Benoit Blanc, a southern fried investigator who’s been hired, anonymously, to dig deeper and find a murderer.

If this review of Knives Out sounds like a roll call, that’s because I’m doing my darndest to avoid anything that could be read as a spoiler. Johnson, whose career kicked-off with the hard boiled high school mystery Brick and the con-artist caper The Brothers Bloom, is a master of the puzzle-box movie, and Knives Out is him at his cheekiest. Why ruin that for anyone coming in blind?

After the emotional triumph of The Last Jedi (yes, the trolls are wrong), Johnson’s gone back to playing dastardly games with viewers, in the very genre that inspired a series of board games and theme parties. However, in the wake of so many Agatha Christie adaptations, numerous Sherlock Holmes’ tales, and the likes of Clue and Murder She Wrote (all of which get a shout-out here), I did wonder how Johnson would manage to offer up something new and surprising, putting aside the all-star assembly line of suspects he’d wrangled. And, again, to even describe how he manages to lull us into a false sense of security—telling an entirely different type of story than the one we’d signed on for—might be dropping too-early a hint for any audience members hoping to outwit him.

So, you’re on your own, I’m afraid. The problem is that I think it’s so good I can’t even explain why I’m recommending it. (Twist!) If Knives Out was a lesser movie, I might not be so secretive. But then, a lesser movie wouldn’t have as rich a story as this one does, or as nifty a subversion of genre to spoil. What I'll say is that the perspective of this film, and where its sympathies lie, is genuinely unique. I’ll leave it at that. 

I suppose I can at least talk about the performers. Craig is great fun as Blanc, who’s less Hercule Poirot and more like Inspector Clouseau; much of the picture’s tension comes from wondering whether or not he’ll actually figure out whahappened rather than whodunnit. Shannon, Collette, Plummer and especially Evans—as the smarmy trust-fund kid "Ransom"—are delights too, not to diminish any of their co-stars (when there’s 11 people on the poster, you gotta pick faves, otherwise you’re just listing their names again). Best of the lot is Ana de Armas as the kindly, resilient, resourceful nurse Marta, who becomes Blanc’s closest confidant thanks to her giveaway trait during interrogations: she can’t lie without immediately projectile vomiting.

Yes, Knives Out is a bombastic comedy. Still, it has potent moments of political commentary, with members of the well-off family representing different sides of the far-left and far-right spectrum. Their prejudices, entitlements and assumptions of how things should go for people like them ends up being their undoing. In that way, Knives Out is kind of like the acidic TV show Succession, if the characters in Succession finally tried to do one another in via murder most foul.

4/5

In Australian cinemas 28 November. Rated M for mature themes and coarse language.

Header Image: StudioCanal