Knives Out (2019) Director: Rian Johnson
“You had to find a game to play with him, and if you did that, and you played by his rules…”
A subtextual examination of hot-button contemporary political issues like class and immigration, Rian Johnson’s Knives Out is a whodunnit murder mystery with plenty of misdirection and subtle clues buried deep in each line of dialogue. Knives Out offers just the right amount of comedy and drama –with a nice blend of classic and modern movie tropes. I thought this was a great movie, and a refreshing change of pace in our contemporary cinematic landscape. I was keen to note that the title for this film was apparently borrowed from the Radiohead song “Knives Out” from the Amnesiac (2001) album, though the film and the song share little in common.
Mr. Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer), an 85-year-old bestselling murder mystery writer, is found dead at his vast country estate with his throat slit (ostensibly believed to be a suicide). One week later, the police arrive at his mansion to investigate a few more questions. Detective Eliott (LaKeith Stanfield) and Trooper Wagner (Noah Segan) interview each family member separately –but they are joined by an eccentric private investigator with a thick southern drawl, “the last of the gentleman sleuths,” named Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig). He has been hired by an anonymous client via an envelope filled with cash.
In a series of intimate interviews we meet each member of the Thrombey family and we learn about their various activities at Harlan’s birthday party the night before his death. Notably, Harlan’s mother Wanetta “Nana” (K Callan) has very little to say. Harlan’s eldest daughter, Linda Drysdale (Jamie Lee Curtis), is a Boston real estate business owner. Her husband, Richard (Don Johnson), has been secretly having an affair, which Harlan discovered and confronted him about. Their arrogant trust fund son Hugh “Ransom” Drysdale (Chris Evans), is despised by everyone in the family. Harlan’s youngest son, Walt (Michael Shannon), runs the family publishing company “Blood Like Wine.” His wife is Donna (Riki Lindhome), and their son Jacob (Jaeden Martel) is politically active online, he is referred to as “literally a Nazi” and “an alt-right troll.” Joni Thrombey (Toni Collette) is Harlan’s daughter-in-law. She married Neil and they had a daughter together named Meg (Katherine Langford) but Neil died some 15 years ago and now Joni runs a skincare company called Flam.
In one way or another, everyone in the family is financially dependent on Harlan, but during his birthday party, Harlan decided to cut each person off from the family wealth for legitimate reasons. The morning after the party, the housekeeper Fran (Edi Patterson) discovers Harlan in bed with his throat slit, initially believed to be a suicide. We receive all of this information through a series of flashbacks, primarily from the perspective of Marta Cabrera (Ana de Armas), Harlan’s nurse who was hired part-time, but quickly became a good friend to Harlan, and even akin to a family member. Her mother is an undocumented immigrant and lives in fear of being deported. This social-political tension serves as a key plot point in Knives Out. While some members of the Thrombey family proudly display their xenophobic reactionary right-wing views, others are openly liberal, appropriately quoting “Hamilton” and offering comfortable criticisms of the class structure in America (though none seems to know Marta’s true country of origin –is it Ecuador, Paraguay, Uruguay, Brazil or none of the above?) However, when Harlan’s will is read aloud by the family attorney (Frank Oz), the Thrombeys are horrified to learn that Harlan has left his entire estate to Marta, and excluded all other family members. Suddenly, any false display of liberal platitudes goes out the window, and the family becomes united in their opposition to Marta. With money on the line, the knives come out. The Thrombeys use a variety of dirty tricks to compel Marta to renounce the estate, but she manages to outmaneuver each of their whims one by one.
Halfway through the film, we are given the story of Harlan’s death from Marta’s eyes –an apparent mix-up of his medicine which led to an elaborate scheme developed by Harlan for a remorseful, reluctant Marta. It is the kind of murder tale only someone like Harlan Thrombey, a bestselling murder mystery writer, could concoct. Fearful of being discovered and of her family being deported, Marta must hide the truth, in spite of her regurgitative reaction to lying. But is Marta’s account of things the full story? There may be more than meets the eye in this delightful whodunnit murder mystery.
Upon a second viewing, there is a tremendous amount of misdirection in this film –the coffee at the opening and close of the film (with script reading “My House – My Rules – My Coffee”), the baseball ball in Harlan’s office which appears at key moments in the film, the subtly changing portrait of Harlan that hangs in the house, the pair of dogs who greet people differently (“the best judge of character is a dog”), an intractable knife versus the real thing, Harlan’s letter written with invisible ink, the game of GO, Benoit Blanc quietly noticing blood on Marta’s shoe in the first moment he meets her, and so on. Across the board, there are some wonderful performances in this film –Daniel Craig, Ana de Armas, Christopher Plummer, Chris Evans, Jamie Lee Curtis, and others. In some ways, we might be tempted to read Knives Out as an immigrant’s revenge tale, but there are a great many more layers of depth to this film as it explores how poorly will wealthy people behave when they are under threat of losing everything?
The most cleverly written whodunit I’ve seen since The Last Of Sheila. Thank you for your review.