Knives Out: Clever Whodunnit Elevates (and Subverts) Mansion Murder Mystery Genre

By Thom Ernst

Rating: A-

Knives Out is a charming and wonderfully crafted whodunnit that, despite the inevitable presence of a dead body, plays like a warm and cozy antidote to the winter chills.

Director Rian Johnson’s somewhat comedic take on the mansion murder-mystery is done for laughs rather than for squeamish thrills. As a comedy, the humour registers as more amusing than anything it might offer in out-right belly laughs; you’re liable to smile more than you’ll guffaw. But it’s in this way that Johnson’s movie is suitably more playful than, let’s say, any film that’s based directly on a board game. (I’m looking at you, Clue.)

Johnson willfully plays with the whodunnit genre, but he resists toying with the mechanics of a solid mystery. There are rules to which the mansion murder mystery must adhere: There needs to be a mansion, there needs to be a mixed gathering of agreeable and disagreeable personalities (preferably blood-related), there needs to be a dead body, there needs to be a multitude of reasons as to why that body should end up dead, and there needs to be one person to wade through the chaos and unravel a conclusion that is both astounding and yet logical. The challenge for Johnson is to adhere to all those rules while still creating something original. That really hasn’t happened since 2001 when Robert Altman directed Gosford Park.

Successful mystery novelist Harlan Thromby (Christopher Plummer) begrudgingly agrees to celebrate his 85th birthday with his sycophantic brood of coattail-riding miscreants. He’d much rather spend the evening playing Go with his friend and caregiver (Ana de Armas). The evening is wrought with whispers, innuendos, and snippets of overheard conversations, cloaked beneath the façade of everyone getting along. It’s all fun and games until someone—in this case, Harlan—winds up dead.

Ironically, seasoned mystery fans are the most likely to be surprised by the film’s outcome. Newbies to the genre, unburdened by the expectations of familiar tropes, might not be so readily led astray. No matter. Either way, the film works. The reveal is merely a cap on a delightfully told story.

Veteran mystery fans are liable to look upon Knives Out as a reverent homage to cinematic recreations of stories by way of such authors like Agatha Christie, Patricia Highsmith, and Ellery Queen. They aren’t wrong. Johnson dutifully defers to both the literary and cinematic styles that precede him. He steeps the screen in rich mahogany that reflects an old-school world of impervious privilege. He then sets up a situation where everyone is a reasonable suspect. Johnson adds to the fun by casting a host of familiar faces.

Jamie Lee Curtis appears as the deceased’s eldest daughter, with Don Johnson, making a surprise comedic turn, as her Trump-supporting husband—his feeble rationale against immigration provides one of the film’s most satiric moments. Chris Evans is the family black sheep—a ne’er-do-well playboy with a penchant for sports cars and designer drugs. Michael Shannon chews up the scenery as the younger son struggling to get his father to relinquish movie-rights to one of his books. Toni Collette is the widowed daughter-in-law whose new-age lifestyle, as well as her daughter’s private school education, depends on the continued financial support provided by her father-in-law. And Daniel Craig, doing a southern-baked version of Hercule Poirot, topping the cast as celebrated private-eye mysteriously conscripted to solve the mystery.

Some will remember Rian Johnson as the man who twisted genres by combing hard-boiled noir dialogue with contemporary teen drama for his film Brick (2005). Others will have a keener (love or hate) connection with Johnson for his efforts on Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi (2017). My affections are for Johnson’s mind-bending time-travel sage, Looper (2012) which pitted an assassin (Bruce Willis) against his younger self (Joseph Gordon-Leavitt). There is in Looper a twisted logic that unfolds out of the chaos—an element shared, to a lesser degree, in Knives Out.

Knives Out is a satisfying whodunnit. See it twice; once to play the game, to track the clues, discard the red-herrings (whatever you might perceive them to be) and to read between the lies. Then see it again to watch how cleverly all the pieces fit together.

Knives Out. Dirercted by Rian Johnson. Starring Ana de Armas, Christopher Plummer, Daniel Craig, Jamie Lee Curtis, Michael Shannon, Toni Collette, Chris Evans, Katherine Langford, and LaKeith Stanfield. Opens wide November 27.