Knives Out

Well, I thankfully managed to go see Knives Out while it is still in theaters. Directed by Rian Johnson, it's an Agatha Christie-style murder mystery with Daniel Craig playing the Poirot/Marple role - a charming and eccentric character named Benoit Blanc.

The story is about the family of Harlan Trombley, played by the legendary Christopher Plummer, a famous and successful mystery writer whose fortune has allowed his family to live comfortably under the illusion that they are all self-made successes.

On the night of his 85th birthday, Harlan ascends to his office, and when his housekeeper comes to bring him breakfast in the morning, he's dead, having apparently slashed his own throat.

As the police work on finishing up the investigation, a mysterious detective appears - one Benoit Blanc (Craig,) who seems to have some special insights into the tangled mess of a family.

Naturally, this is a mystery story, and is thus the demesne of twists and turns. I won't go too far into it, but one of the fascinating twists of the movie is that the circumstances of Harlan's death actually become quite apparent pretty early in the film. One might imagine that it then takes the form of dramatic irony - where we see the killer attempt to cover it up from the detective, the latter becoming something of a heroic antagonist.

But this relatively precedented subversion of the mystery genre is itself subverted once it becomes evident that there are pieces missing from the story we're told.

I can't say that I found the final twist particularly surprising - more a competently done unraveling of the engima. But it is well-acted, well-directed, and also has an allegorical underpinning that I find very interesting.

Let's go into the spoilers.


We find out early that Harlan's death was an accident - the result of mixed-up medications. When Martha (Ana de Armas,) Harlan's kind-hearted nurse accidentally injects him with 100mg of morphine - about 30 times what she was supposed to give him - she realizes that they have very little time to save him - he's basically doomed. But Harlan knows things she doesn't - he knows that he's left her his entire fortune, and that if she were blamed for the death, even as an accident, she would not be eligible to get the inheritance. On top of that, he knows that Martha's mother is undocumented, and that the scrutiny that could come down on them might mean her mother is deported.

So Harlan concocts a plan to absolve her of wrongdoing and make it appear as if he has killed himself, or rather, he plans to kill himself to absolve her of wrongdoing, and make sure that she has an alibi for his time of death.

She follows his instructions to the best of her ability, but all of this is done with a serious challenge: Martha has a condition where she vomits if she tells a lie.

It's a little hokey, to be frank, and I'll be honest in saying that I suspected she was making that condition up to earn a trustworthy reputation. One could imagine an alternate version of this film in which Martha really is a diabolical manipulator.

Instead, what we discover is that the odd loose ends were actually the result of a very real murder plot. The identity of the killer is not terribly shocking, though the irony is that they actually fail to murder Harlan, but set up the circumstances accidentally that will lead to his death.

As a murder mystery, it plays some fun games with the form even if it isn't quite as clockwork neat as others. For instance, the film almost makes it seem as if a confession to attempted murder isn't, you know, pretty close to being as bad as confessing to successful murder, making the announcement that another character is actually dead a sort of dramatic beat that felt a little unnecessary.

What I think is more interesting is the way that the Trombley family represents the failures of American culture. Trombley's politics aren't really discussed, but the family seems to have bought into Trumpist nationalism, and almost all of them are painfully self-important and self-satisfied and, well, shitty.

Meanwhile, Martha, a first generation Latina, is defined by her fundamental goodness. It's, perhaps, not the most nuanced take on the situation, but it makes the ending shot, of Martha looking down at the family from the balcony of the house that she now owns, pretty satisfying.

I don't know if the film is saying anything terribly profound about America's current state, but it does feel like a condemnation of the well-educated and affluent embracing racist ideologues in the interest of retaining their wealth and status. Toni Collette's hippy-dippy liberal daughter-in-law has tinges of both-sides-ism, but it's clear that our sympathies lie with our hardworking and kind-hearted nurse. It's not a subversion, but I wonder whether most viewers would consider it a double-subversion of simply playing things straight.

I'll confess that I've also been going to see largely just big franchise blockbusters at the theaters, and there is something a little refreshing about a star-studded murder mystery with a medium budget. Yes, it's got Zod and Captain America in it, but both play against type in fun ways.