Knives Out. Image courtesy of Lionsgate.
I watched Knives Out, written and directed by Rian Johnson, from end to end with a smile on my face the whole time. This movie is delightful. It’s an Agatha Christie-style whodunit, starring a panoply of marquee stars - Michael Shannon, Chris Evans, Jamie Lee Curtis, Toni Collette, Christopher Plummer, Don Johnson and of course Daniel Craig chewing the scenery with his perfectly ridiculous Foghorn Leghorn impression. This sprawling cast of characters is brought together in an opulent country mansion as they all seek to solve and profit from the death of the family patriarch. It’s a classic murder mystery structure, creating a little self-contained universe of characters any one of whom could plausibly be the murderer, if indeed there is a murderer at all.
Johnson plays with the structure a bit, essentially tipping his hand in the beginning in such a way that you spend the rest of the film trying to suss out the twist. The ending doesn’t really make a lot of sense when you think about it at any length, but that’s totally beside the point. Because like any whodunit, the plot is merely window dressing. You know the structure, you know the basic trajectory. The fun is all in how it is executed, and this film is made with such consummate skill that it’s a pure pleasure just to watch how the thing unfolds.
Knives Out is beautifully shot, acted and edited. It’s very funny. It doesn’t take itself too seriously, everyone knows exactly what kind of film they are making and it’s fiendishly entertaining. The film also takes great pleasure in skewering the .1% and has a few things to say about social class. A brief interlude about the Trump administration and immigration policy is rather awkwardly shoe-horned in which might have benefited from being left on the cutting room floor, but truly that is probably the only criticism I can find in this film.
This is also a great film to go see after spending the holidays with your family, because whatever bickering you and Uncle Todd did about politics while carving up the turkey, it pales in comparison to what the family in Knives Out has been doing to one another for decades.
