Mark Reviews Movies: KNIVES OUT

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 26, 2019

The opening sequence of Knives Out will be familiar to anyone who has watched or read a murder mystery from within the last century or so. There's a grand manor in the middle of a forest, and a series of still shots follow the progress of the mansion's housekeeper, who is bringing the owner his breakfast (including a hot drink in a mug, which kind of sums up the nature of the home's owner—"My house, my rules"—and, when all is said and done, ends up serving as a wickedly satisfying punch line to the story). After climbing a few sets of stairs, including a hidden staircase located behind a false wall, the housekeeper discovers a grisly scene.

The owner of the house, reclined on a couch in his private office, is dead. His throat has been slit.

Such a scene usually arrives a bit later in such tales, after we have been introduced to the eventual victim and have met the string of probable suspects. Writer/director Rian Johnson cuts right to the chase, though, because his murder mystery isn't much of a mystery. There are plenty of twists and turns and surprises and shocks in this plot, to be sure, although the most surprising shock is how he transforms this fundamental setup.

We think we're watching a murder mystery, but then, the truth of the victim's death is revealed at the end of the first act. From that point, we're watching more of a Hitchcockian thriller, as a central character has to cover a trail of evidence as the investigation unfolds. While we're experiencing that, Johnson lays out a potent allegory, too—about the many false faces of the entitled and wealthy, who argue about the specifics of contemporary politics but are really just terrible people beneath their overt awfulness or their superficial sentiments of compassion.

While all of that is unfolding, the filmmaker, unbeknownst to us, is still laying the groundwork for a more traditional mystery. Somehow, he has done all of this while also injecting some unexpected but welcome humor and creating a cast of memorable characters (including a wholly sympathetic protagonist, who has an amusingly effective physiological truth-detector, and an old-fashioned detective, who is so fascinating that he deserves at least another half-dozen mysteries to solve). Without sacrificing any of the fun and thrills of a murder mystery, Johnson toys with the basic structure and expectations of a well-worn genre.

It begins, though, with the discovery of a gruesome death. Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer), a famous mystery writer, is indeed dead by way of a knife cutting his throat. The police assume suicide, because, despite how dramatic the death may seem, just look at this house, which, as Lieutenant Elliott (LaKeith Stanfield)—the police detective in charge of the investigation—notes, looks like a Clue board brought to life.

We meet the rest of Harlan's family in a dynamic montage that serves to introduce characters and to dump exposition. The major players/suspects are the author's two surviving children—Linda (Jamie Lee Curtis), who has become a successful businesswoman on her own (well, with a loan from her dad that doesn't need to be paid back), and Walt (Michael Shannon), who runs the family's publishing house—as well as a pair of in-laws—Richard (Don Johnson), who's married to Linda, and Joni (Toni Collette), the widow of Harlan's late son and a self-help guru.

While being questioned by Elliott and the distracted-by-fame State Trooper Wagner (Noah Segan), the family members evade questions, cast suspicions on their relatives (especially Harlan's grandson Ransom, played by Chris Evans, who doesn't show up until his grandfather's will is about to be read), and lie through their teeth. We know this because Johnson provides objective memories from the night of Harlan's death, showing just how everyone might have possessed a motive to stop Harlan from making drastic changes to his business and his will.

In the background of the interrogations, there's a man, tapping a high note on a piano whenever the cops lose their way in the questioning. He's Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), a renowned private investigator with a Southern-fried accent, whose methods of deduction are so simple and straightforward that we might believe he isn't doing any work. He simply looks at the facts, allows things progress as they might, and lets the path of "gravity's rainbow" lead him to the solution. He hasn't read the Thomas Pynchon novel from which he obtained that metaphor, by the way. He just likes the sound of it.

The final player is Marta (Ana de Armas), Harlan's nurse, who was—unless he was murdered by someone—the last person to see the writer alive. She's an immigrant, whose mother is undocumented, and while Harlan's relatives treat her with apparent kindness (calling her part of the family and insisting that they'll take care of her once the matter of the author's estate is settled), they don't invite her to funeral (Each one says they think she should have been invited) and don't even bother to figure out from what country she comes (Depending on whom one asks, she's from Ecuador, Paraguay, or Brazil).

In a lengthy flashback, which takes place during the flip of a coin, we learn that Marta knows much more than she is willing to divulge. That's a problem, because she also is incapable of lying without violently vomiting, which is ingenious on at least three levels—as a funny running gag, as a way to generate suspense (because she's always an involuntary reflex away from giving away condemning truth to the detective), and as an emphasis of how fundamentally honest, decent, and compassionate Marta is as a person. She is, essentially, the only good person in a den of manipulators and connivers, even as she tries to manipulate and connive her way out of a potential mess.

Johnson's film is a marvel of a juggling act, taking the basics, the allegorical elements, and the key characters of this story very seriously, while also adjusting and re-adjusting the mechanics and modes of the plot. Knives Out is simultaneously playful and sincere, and as a result, it keeps us on our toes—well beyond trying to figure out who did what and why.

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