WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Knives Out. If you have not seen this movie but hope to do so, do not continue reading.
I’ve been on a murder-mystery kick for the last several days, so I was interested in giving Knives Out a try. The trailer gave off some serious Agatha Christie/Clue vibes and so I was instantly hooked by the premise.
In spite of my excitement, I was preparing myself for disappointment. There have been many trailers over the years that have gotten me pumped up over the years, only to disappoint me when I actually went out of my way to see them in theaters.
I’m happy to say this was not the case in this instance.
Not only did the film deliver, it exceeded my expectations.
While the premise intrigued me, I went in expecting the characters to be one-dimensional. Even murder-mystery staples like Christie can be guilty of creating characters severely underdeveloped for the sake of plot progression. However, I was quickly proven incorrect on that score as well.
While not likable, the family members are all quite believable each in their own respect. They are all greedy and self-absorbed but not to a cartoonish degree. Even when their avarice is on display it’s usually done in a subtle way.
I was especially impressed by Marta Cabrera, the heroine of the movie. Considering she is supposed to be the moral center of this film and surrounded by such awful people, they could have easily made her cloying or Disney Princess-y, but they managed to make her an exceedingly good person in a realistic manner.
Even Detective Blanc, for all his hamminess, was enjoyable and a nice change from Daniel Craig’s normal catalogue of characters. It’s great to see a movie where Craig has more than one facial expression. Turns out he has some comedy chops as well as he constantly had the theatre laughing with his languid analogies such as the donut hole.
His Southern-Georgian accent was…pretty terrible but it grew on me the longer I heard it. And the way he chewed the scenery like a cow chews cud brought me endless joy.
While we’re on the subject of characters, I have to say, the scene where the family members are fighting over politics is probably the most realistic depiction of a political argument in a familial setting that I’ve ever seen put to film. I was also struck by how balanced it was, portraying all members as being lunatics rather than one side being completely right or wrong. It added a layer to realism to the movie that I wasn’t expecting. While the events transpiring around them were unreal, the characters themselves were very authentic and thus made it easier for the audience to suspend disbelief.
As for the plot, I admire it on many different levels. On one level, it clearly wanted to exude Agatha Christie vibes (as previously stated) but it quickly became its own entity. In fact, I suspect the old English murder-mystery tone was created as a way of subverting our expectations of what was to come. It certainly did mine. While I thought the idea of the grandfather’s “murder” being the result of a tragic accident rather than malicious intent was genius, the movie hadn’t even reached the halfway mark yet. If the murder had been solved, then what the hell was the rest of the movie going to be about? As it happens, the movie was in much more capable hands than I suspected.
Through the course of the story, we learn that what happened that night wasn’t nearly so cut and dry as we thought. While we knew what occurred superficially, we didn’t realize we should be looking for a why. We didn’t think to ask why Marta had mixed up the drugs. We just assumed it was an honest mistake. Happens all the time. As a result, the movie was able to play with our lack of curiosity and create an even bigger, more jaw-dropping story.
The writing for this movie is some of the smartest I’ve seen. I think Joker beats it out as my favorite movie of the year, but the amount of care that was put into this script really shows. It wasn’t just a murder-mystery epic, it was also heartbreaking at times, and funny.
You would think, granted to severity of the character’s circumstances, the humor would be jarring. On the contrary, it’s delicately woven in and genuinely had me and many others laughing out loud.
Then there is the ending.
The ending is pure genius because it encapsulates a forgotten principle in film-making: Show don’t tell.
After the climax, Marta is left debating whether or not she should help the Thrombey family financially. Since they were each ceremoniously cut from the grandfather’s will and she was given everything, she wonders if it is morally just to honor Harlan’s wishes, or if it would be better to have pity on them.
Her decision is never spoken out loud, but the movie clearly gives us an answer to her moral dilemma. While out on the lawn, in the wake of Ransom’s arrest, the family gaze up at Marta as she stands above them (metaphorically and literally) on the balcony, nursing one of Harlan’s mugs. She wordlessly takes a sip, her hand covering the bottom of the mug’s topography. However, we can clearly see two words engraved on the front above her hand: My house.
Brilliant.
If I had to nitpick, I might argue the movie is a bit too long, but honestly I don’t care. This was an amazingly written, fun, and exciting romp to the movies and I loved it.
10/10
The Crooked Pen 