Film Review — "Knives Out"
I went through a very serious Agatha Christie phase in the seventh grade after discovering And Then There Were None in a library used book sale. The cover intrigued me. Big red letters over a hanging noose and overturned stool, with a trail of blood leading to it… So murder-curious little me had to have it.
And I devoured it over a weekend.
To my amazement, Dame Agatha, the author of what would be my favorite book for several years, had written dozens of novels—many of which feature one of two recurring sleuths: Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot. And although today I would name Marple as my preferred investigator, I was much more intrigued by Poirot in my middle school days.
Poirot’s eccentricities, I think, are what drew me more to him—a small francophone Belgian man with a weak stomach and a strong wardrobe, and an impeccably sculpted mustache. The man is basically always in drag, if you think about it. His appearance is important to him, so of course damage being done to his clothes and shoes are a running gag of the series.
In Rian Johnson’s Knives Out, Daniel Craig’s private detective Benoit Blanc stands out in his own way, as a dashing southerner with a somewhat cartoonish drawl amidst wealthy New Englanders. The subject of a recent profile in The New Yorker, Blanc has been hired by an anonymous person to solve the murder of Harlan Thrombey, a famous crime writer played by Christopher Plummer, found dead the morning after his 85th birthday party.
Craig is absolutely wonderful. I cannot wait to see what he does when he’s done with Bond, because he has proven several times now that he is one of our greatest living character actors. What really works about his famous sleuth is just how thoroughly he leans in to Johnson’s vision.
Johnson’s direction is practically a character unto itself. Whether or not you like Knives Out, if Johnson hasn’t proven to you by the end that he’s a master craftsman… I’m frankly not sure what further evidence you need. The man clearly loves genre filmmaking (see: Brick, Looper, The Last Jedi, etc.). And I applaud him for tackling a revisionist whodunit without veering into masturbatory territory. Knives Out so easily could’ve been unbearably tongue-in-cheek or self-referential.
With cinematographer Steve Yedlin and editor Bob Ducsay, Johnson lends the film plenty of energy and life without being overtly showy. (Don’t get me wrong, it can be showy. But in a way that jibes with the elevated whodunit* concept.) Of course, few films can get by with just a handful of clever filming techniques.
Rounding out the ensemble of main suspects we have Jamie Lee Curtis, who’s delightful though underused as Thrombey’s media mogul daughter; Don Johnson, who plays her leechy cheating husband quite well; Michael Shannon, who’s always fun to watch as the desperate-to-please son running his father’s publishing house; Toni Collette, as the whacky lifestyle guru wife to Thrombey’s deceased third child; and Chris Evans, who is perfect as the sexy playboy grandson. The cast is exceptional. Like Craig, they all truly commit to who they’re playing.
The film’s real heavy-hitter, though—among a company full of heavy-hitters—is Ana de Armas as Marta, Thrombey’s personal nurse and closest confidante. No doubt, de Armas has a future. This is a star-making turn if I ever did see one. Her “Watson” to Craig’s Blanc is a match made in homicide heaven, but I obviously am not about to divulge why…
My mind’s made up! Knives Out is entertaining as hell. And on top of everything I’ve already mentioned, part of what kept the film so amusing is the fact that the trailer does not give it all away. It might feature shots from the beginning to the end, but it’s imperceptible where they belong without prior knowledge. It also does not reveal the film’s brilliant jackknife plot shifts. I thought I’d seen the whole movie when I watched the trailer, but thankfully I was dead wrong.
*I loathe the term elevated horror—I’m merely being glib.
