[9.4/10] A good mystery has to do a lot to be, well, good. It has to have a satisfying answer to the “whodunnit” question. But that answer can’t be too predictable or the audience won’t have the thrill of following along. But it also can’t be too out of left field or it will feel like a cheat. So any mystery writer has to balance including enough setups and clues to where the payoff feel earned, but so many that the solution feels obvious or pre-ordained.
But there should also be something more at the heart of the mystery than just the answer to who the killer is. The answer should reveal something deeper about the story, about its major players, about the why and the who behind the mystery. In short, there should be...well...a good donut hole inside the smaller donut inside the larger donut.
*Knives Out* does it all with flying colors. Its mystery succeeds like clockwork. Writer-director Rian Johnson (of *The Last Jedi* fame) sets up every little detail to perfection. He lays out his suspects and their motives, establishes the victim and the investigators, and doles out subtle hints at just the right intervals to keep the audience guessing, but informed enough to craft their own theories and follow along.
But he also imbues all that mystery machinery with a larger theme that meshes perfectly with the ecosystem and the family he’s created. On a pure story level, that comes down to rewarding the person who works hard, who acts with kindness and altruism even when it could rip their lives apart, while the people who claim to be her betters are a hypocritical bunch who were born on third base and think they’ve hit a triple. But on a social level, it’s about the same hypocrisy in how we treat immigrants, in how people of every persuasion treat someone they think they’re above, how that treatment shifts markedly when it conflicts with their self-interest, and how that immigrant’s hard work, decency, and above all selflessness makes her more worthy than all the scratching, clawing simps she’s father above than she realizes.
But rather than devolving into didactic sequences to communicate these ideas, Johnson does it all with style and with good humor. Even for a murder mystery that mostly occurs within a single house, Johnson, cinematographer Steve Yedlin, and their superb team bring so much visual flair to the picture. Even before anyone’s said a word, the autumnal feel of the piece and the august old manor establish a sense of tone and place within the world of *Knives Out*.
Once the movie kicks into gear, that aesthetic virtuosity remains. Johnson and Yedlin set up any number of Wes Anderson-esque tableaus, arranging all the major players in a series of expressive group shots. The scene where the Thrombeys descend on Marta conveys the overwhelming chaos of the scene by switching to steadicam and putting us into the suddenly jostled world that the poor girl’s been thrust into. And the sequence where a faux-affable Walt all but advances on Marta, with the thump of his cane and his first tightening around its handle, communicates the intimidation at play.
Despite those moments of fear, and the tension that permeates the film almost from the jump, *Knives Out* is a rollicking good time. For as much as the movie is a taut mystery and broader sociopolitical commentary, it’s also an eminently fun laugh riot. Johnson knows when to puncture the tension with a big laugh, and bolstered by Daniel Craig’s performance of a colorful Hercule Poirot by way of Frank Underwood, he’s able to make his characters poignant, menacing, or hilarious on a dime.
But he also knows how to deploy them nigh-perfectly in his well-crafted whodunnit. Johnson and company structure and pace their film brilliantly. The opening act lulls you into thinking you know who the obvious suspects and likely motives for the murder of the Thrombey patriarch are. But then he turns the mystery on its ear, showing the audience exactly, and in elegant detail, how he died and who killed him. The opening police interviews turn out to just be a smart way to introduce these characters and establish their place within Harlan Thrombey’s world.
From there, we follow the tension of the knowledge that Marta is the murderer, but also enlisted to help Benoit Blanc discoverer who the murderer is. The devices that Johnson uses in that effort -- Marta’s lie-related nausea, Harlan’s mystery novel-writer expertise in fooling the authorities, the extra question of who hired Blanc -- all heighten the fun and the twisty excitement as the case progresses. This is, laudably, Marta’s story, and the way her position change, from bystander to inadvertent murderer to overwhelmed patsy to triumphant hero, is aided by the different ways the mystery bends around her.
But the most striking of all if the way that both friend and foe turn against her once it’s revealed that she stands to inherit Harlan’s entire estate. Even including the intricately-crafted mystery, it’s *Knives Out* best twist. Johnson spends so much of the first act accounting for the different ways the various Thrombeys treat Marta, from dismissive to patronizing to seemingly embracing and understanding. But the second that her financial interest seems to run counter to theirs, every one of them, even and especially the ones who seemed to be decent and kind to her, immediately view her as an interloper denying them of what’s rightfully theirs.
That’s powerful. Johnson and his team build a mystery that unfolds spectacularly, with twists and turns to keep the viewer on the edge of their seat, small clues that add up to big reveals, and variations on the usual form that make it both thrilling and seamless. And yet, it’s biggest strength lies in what the answers to the mystery novel questions *Knives Out* asks say about the answers to the societal questions it asks in kind.
Johnson’s film is populated with people who believe they are self-made, who built themselves from the ground up, but who are (with one notable exception), entirely hangers on to someone who truly rose to the top of his field through hard work. It’s that kind soul who recognizes his equal and successor not in the slew of self-siding progeny jockeying for position against one another (whom he “cuts loose” to wean them of their dependency), but in the one person they all consider themselves better-than. The Thrombey’s all think themselves superior by dint of birth and by right, but it’s the young woman who, through the good character, industriousness, and decency none of them possesses, proves herself smarter and more worthy than any of them to inherit his fortune, and his legacy. And that makes for one hell of a mystery.
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