Something else I thought about, thematically. I know this is super obvious, but one of the themes of the movie is the masks people wear.
There’s the surface-layer stuff about the covid masks, like the way whassername wore the ridiculous open-weave one.
Then we have Miles, who pretends to be a genius. And the circle of guests, who all pretend that they haven’t sold their souls to him. Whiskey and Duke are both pretending to be into the misogyny schtick. Etc.
Of course Helen is pretending to be Adi.
And then Blanc, we learn, was pretending to have been invited. He was also pulling a Colombo act with the “southern hokum” routine to make everyone underestimate him.
We watched it New Year’s Eve. Mrs Magill and I enjoyed it. I initially thought the film cheated, too, but it turns out that it didn’t. It deceived, but it didn’t cheat. New Rockstars had a good breakdown that highlighted the easter eggs, cameos, and clues.
Regarding Blanc and Phillip, I thought it was pretty obvious they were partners (My mother addresses my father by his last name regularly. They met in college, and that was what all his friends called him.), but overall, Blanc’s personal life wasn’t relevant to the mystery, so who cares?
When Blanc and Helen are talking over tea, Blanc made it pretty clear that he would take the case, not out of boredom, but rather over pursuit of The Truth.
I was thinking Louisville, but Blanc talks with a Kentucky Patrician accent, so that may have influenced my perception.
I figured it was some sort of essential oils type bullshit. Notice how Blanc kept his six feet buffer?
I agree with this statement… and I hate myself for it.
I’ll admit I assumed it was a “rich person only” vaccine. At that point in the movie, the only thing we really know (ie the only thing the movie has told us) about Miles is that he’s rich, likes puzzles, and every now and then he has an absurdly brilliant idea that his pet scientists make manifest. It wasn’t out of left field to believe that he had access to a vaccine.
I really liked that. On the complete opposite end of the spectrum is Katherine Hahn. When she’s talking to Blanc her mask slips off her nose. She clearly notices it and you can see her go to pull it back up, hesitate for a second then fix it. I’m assuming it wasn’t supposed to do that. The little hesitation almost looked like the actor trying trying to decide if she should fix it or leave it for the sake of the scene, but it came across to me as the character deciding what she should do.
And when she answers the door for the delivery in the beginning, I got the sense she was covering her face because she felt that she needed to do so, as opposed to doing it for safety.
She also refused to hug Birdie at the beginning. As I recall, Birdie asked if she could hug everyone as Katherine Hahn (and others) said ‘no’, but at the same time you can see her adjusting her mask, presumably because Birdie is a hugger and she see the fishnet mask.
I went to an event where masks were required and one woman showed up wearing something much like that. We joked that she was trying to prevent the ping-pong-ball sized infectious particles from getting at her. An organizer made her wear an actual facemask, though.
My user-name is Puzzle Gal. I collect puzzles, and hang out with other puzzle collectors. I don’t specialize in puzzle boxes, but I’ve played with quite a lot of them, and have a couple of comments re this one:
First, I LOVED that the film pandered to the puzzle community, and featured a puzzle box. That being said, it wasn’t a great puzzle box. (It’s also obviously fake, in case you wondered, but let’s pretend it’s a real puzzle box.) The engineering to create it would have been spectacular, But the actual puzzles are a string of “do you recognize these unrelated facts”, rather than being thematically related, or being related to the construction of the box itself. It’s inelegant. Needlessly complex. And all on the surface, so a good metaphor for the movie as a whole.
Did I mention that I loved the inclusion of a puzzle box? And like the masks, it was well done as a reflection of the characters, in this case, Miles.
I just realized (this may have been mentioned upthread) Ani is short for Cassandra, who was cursed with foresight, but that no one would believe her.
…and now I’ve just realized this too.
My experience with puzzles boxes is pretty much limited to playing The Room, but that was fun.
Both Helen and Cassandra are named for characters in the Iliad, too.
Not to get into the “subverting expectations” of it all, but both of these movies have been twists on the whodunnit format. In Knives Out, it starts out a classic “patriarch murdered” whodunnit, only to pull the rug out 30 minutes in to reveal “no he actual just killed himself”, turn into “let’s see if our protagonist can escape being blamed for it”, and then at the end go “Surprise, it is a whodunnit.” Glass Onion, you think it’s going to be a “murder happens during a murder mystery” whodunnit, only to reveal that the murder mystery aspect is irrelevant and the actual murder took place a week earlier.
I think both are also a commentary saying that the “who” in the whodunnit is not that important, it’s the “it”. If Don Johnson had kill Christopher Plummer or Kate Hudson had killed Batista, would it really make a different impact? I can’t help but compare to the middling See How They Run, which actually does the “a murder happens during a murder mystery” plot. And after all the twist and turns they reveal that the killer is a minor character who wasn’t suspected at all and when it gets to that point I’m already thinking to myself “well, I really don’t care who the murderer is.”
My acquaintance was wearing a mesh veil. It didn’t even pretend to touch her chin, and had openings nearly a centimeter wide. I can’t imagine what she was thinking.
But did you notice, each one of the recipients seemed to have one puzzle they recognized before the others? The theme was, he knew what they were like as a group.
It was very funny how Blanc dumped all over it, calling them children’s puzzles.
Bit of a digression, but I always read your username as “Puzz-Legal” and figured you were an attorney. 
Yeah, that’s why i spelled it out. Lots of posters read it that way. 
Goddamnit. I’ll never unsee it now.