Knives Out

The day after his 85^th birthday party, highly successful mystery writer Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer) is found dead. While the police are convinced that it was a suicide, an unknown client has hired famed private detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), who thinks otherwise. After interviewing Harlan’s family, Blanc finds no shortage of potential suspects as the Thrombeys, financially dependent on the old man, were cut off shortly before his death. The lone exception seems to be Harlan’s nurse and confidant, Marta Cabrera (Ana de Armas), who uncontrollably vomits after lying. Enlisting a reluctant Marta as his Watson, Blanc digs for the truth while Marta maneuvers to protect her own family.

Writer/director Rian Johnson took a lot of flack (some deserved, some not) for his narrative choices in Star Wars: The Last Jedi, but his next film finds him on much surer footing. Funny, tense, and stylish, Knives Out is his strongest effort since his debut film Brick, and just as that provided a refreshing take on hardboiled noir, so too does Knives Out revitalize the murder-in-a-mansion mystery.

Though there are shades of Sleuth and Gosford Park, Knives Out owes its biggest debt to Agatha Christie as Blanc, like Poirot, is a bigshot detective with a funny accent (a Foghorn Leghorn drawl in this case) who methodically works his way toward a solution. However, this is as much Marta’s film as it is Blanc’s, and the Thrombeys’ treatment of her (welcoming until the chips are down, dependent yet patronizing, etc.) parallels well-off white America’s relationship with immigrants. Subtle it is not, but at least Johnson’s heavy-handedness doesn’t play favorites: the progressive snowflake college student (Katherine Langford) and her lefty lifestyle guru mom (an overly tanned Toni Collette) are skewered just as much as the alt-right troll teen (Jaeden Martell) and his un-PC parents (Rikki Lindholme and, in a reprisal of their relationship from Midnight Special, Michael Shannon), aunt (a fierce, power suit-clad Jamie Lee Curtis) and uncle (a sleazy, bearded Don Johnson).

Admittedly, Craig’s accent takes some getting used to, but the cast is otherwise game. As Blanc, Craig seems to vacillate between puffed-up baffoon and quirky but brilliant sleuth. De Armas plays Marta with a blend of guile and anxiety that keep her believable and sympathetic (despite the script’s attempts to sanctify her). In flashback scenes, Plummer seems to be having fun as a vivacious, kindly patriarch who is done suffering fools even if they be blood. One of the more amusing performances is an against-type turn from Chris Evans (best known these days as Captain America), who plays the sneering, loutish wastrel of an eldest grandson. Add an exasperated Lakeith Stanfield as a by-the-book cop, Noah Segan (Johnson’s most frequently cast actor) as his starstruck partner, and Frank Oz as an unflappable will-reading attorney, and there are no weak links here.

Johnson has always been a bold stylist, and while the confines of a mansion don’t allow for the spectacle of The Last Jedi or even Looper, Knives Out is still a good-looking film, replete with his signature quick cuts/odd angle shots and abetted by a score from Nathan Johnson (the director’s cousin). Because of this aesthetic and technical prowess and his love of a twist ending, Johnson is sometimes labeled a style-over-substance guy. It’s an unfair label though a few narrative contrivances (Marta’s vomiting, the way that medication and narcotics are presented, etc.) do position Knives Out as not quite as clever as it presents itself to be.

Fresh, fun, and endearing despite (or perhaps because of) a cast of loathsomely selfish individuals, Knives Out is a sharp commentary-as-mystery that more than cuts the mustard.