I won’t spoil anything in the OP, but did anyone else see this? I thought it was excellent for the most part but was a little disappointed in the solution.
The solution to a mystery should be simple and obvious (think The Usual Suspects) but this one was so complicated that I was still putting the pieces together on the drive home.
But it’s really fun with some big laughs. Daniel Craig is great.
I saw it on Saturday, during early previews, and liked it a lot.
I think Johnson really nails the landing in the construction of a whodunit in the very classical sense of the word (as well as its humor and characterizations).
Absolutely no plot spoilers, but an observation about his storytelling craft that may reveal more than some might like (in relation to Agatha Christie):
One of Agatha Christie’s most underrated gifts was the subversive way she deployed Voice in her stories. The reveal was rarely cheap, but firmly embedded in her skill in juggling POVs. This is what Johnson understands perfectly. Twists were rarely gratuitous with her, but an essential part of the construction. Johnson uses (at some point) a playful but extremely smart device that allows the viewer to think they’re one step ahead of the story, but nothing really is as it appears, and from where I’m standing, there aren’t any serious loose ends, either.
It’s a lot of fun and Daniel Craig in particular really shines (though Ana de Armas and Christopher Plummer are marvelous, too), Kentucky-fried accent at all. Post-Bond, I would be very happy if his Benoit Blanc became its own franchise, and this eclipses in every sense Branagh’s latest Dame Christie effort. Check it out!
I saw it at an advance screening last week and thought it was excellent! Very clever, and I want to watch it again to see all the little threads that seemed like throwaway lines but were actually super important.
The set design of the house reminded me of Sleuth (1972 mystery starring Michael Caine and Laurence Olivier). In particular, I saw a figure of a sailor in the house in Knives Out that reminded me of a similar one in Sleuth. And then I saw in an article about Knives Out that the set designers were also thinking of Sleuth.
I enjoyed it a lot. Really kept my interest with no boring lulls. Great to see JLC and Christopher Plummer. I even thought Don Johnson’s acting wasn’t excellent, such as when his character was lying. Loved the old lady too.
I loved it.
I loved seeing the woman who plays Judy from “The Righteous Gemstones” as the house keeper. I want to see her in more things. And I loved Toni Collette’s character so much. Her facial expressions always crack me up.
I thought for sure it was going to be the elderly mother who was behind everything. As soon as she was introduced as a character, I just KNEW it was her.
I liked that Harlan turned out to be a good guy in the end. The evil rich guy trope is so played out. However, it did seem pretty harsh that he didn’t at least set a little money aside for his granddaughter*. Her granddaughter didn’t know that Joni was milking him, and she didn’t seem so bad. And while Linda was a sanctimonious bitch, she wasn’t that despicable either. Even Walt’s crimes didn’t seem so bad to me. So it’s not clear why Harlan did what he did. (But I guess their nasty behavior after the reading of his will was a window into their normal personalities, and it was those personalities that Harlan was thinking about when he wrote them out of his will. So it all makes sense now…)
*It just occurred to me that Harlan knew that Marta would take care of the granddaughter financially. So he didn’t have to set anything aside for her.
I love this movie!
“Nazi child, masturbating in the bathroom.” Ha!
I’ve seen it 3 times now. The first time was at the Chicago International Film Festival in October (with Rian Johnson and Michael Shannon there for a Q&À). It absolutely holds up. Even after you’ve seen the convoluted reveal, a 2nd time was good for catching plot things you might have missed the 1st time, and the 3rd time, for me, was just enjoying the whole damn thing, from the acting, the production design (that HOUSE!), costumes, the dogs, the music, everything.
Marta is the heart and soul of the movie and Ana de Armas did a great job. She’s the relative “unknown” in the famous cast (though I knew her from Blade Runner 2049) and she steals the whole whole thing.
Two different family members say “I thought you should have been at the funeral, but I was outvoted” so I think they all just forgot to invite her, and those people (Linda and Walt, I believe) just threw the rest of the family under the bus. People kept saying Marta was “part of the family” but no one knew or cared where HER family was from. Various family members said Ecuador, Paraguay, Uruguay & Brazil. The movie doesn’t say where Marta’s family is from. Probably none of those though.
Trooper Wagner was delightful. “Big fan, big fan!” When Marta threw up on Ransom"s face, Trooper Wagner was just giddy with joy, “She’s LYING!”. He knew the implication, that Ransom had just confessed to murdering Fran and couldn’t help himself from being thrilled by the twist, even though it meant Fran was dead.
I have to see this again.
It’s funny that a bunch of anti-Rian Johnson manbabies are going into random Knives Out threads on Twitter and thinking they’re spoiling it by saying “Chris Evans did it” and probably feeling very smug about themselves. But of course, they’re wrong. Ransom wanted Harlan dead, but his plan didn’t succeed because Marta was too good at her job. He did kill Fran though, but his other charges would be attempted murder x 2 (Harlan and Marta) plus arson.
Harlan Thrombey committed suicide. Nobody murdered him. Jamie Lee Curtis says in the trailer Whodunnit.
These idiots looking like dumbasses to own Rian Johnson. Ha!
I didn’t quite buy that he would kill himself just because he thought he was gonna die in a few minutes. Or did I miss something? And was it just a coincidence he changed his will a week before?
I think you missed the whole point. He killed himself because he thought he was going to die in a few minutes. AND, the kind nurse would be blamed and charged with murder. He did what he did in order to protect her. It was a spur of the moment decision, one that had to be carried out in 3 minutes (or so he thought). No time for reflective contemplation.
I agree with divemaster’s good answer. Harlan knew that if Marta were arrested for murder or even manslaughter, her mom would be deported. He only had a few minutes to come up with a plan. It wasn’t perfect because a lot of things could have gone wrong, but yeah, he really thought he was going to die, and wanted to protect Marta and her mom.
I think the will change was a coincidence. He had no way of knowing that Ransom would try to kill him that night (though I don’t understand why he didn’t consider the possibility, since Ransom was a scumbag).
I love that name, Ransom. As part of the background, I wonder if Harlan suggested it as a joke, based on the not-jokey Getty story. It seems like the kind of sick humor Harlan would laugh about, while Linda and Richard would be clueless. Ransom himself was probably in on the joke, since he preferred to go by Ransom, while “the help” still called him Hugh.
Well, I got the point since that’s exactly what I said.
But does anyone - especially a crime expert- believe that a massive dose of morphine would take 10 minutes to kill you? And after seven or eight minute of feeling absolutely no effect, would you still kill yourself?
I thought that part was kind of a reach.
Duh I meant “was excellent,” not wasn’t. I hate typos, especially when I make them.
I’m still not sure I got or absorbed everything. It might help (and be fun) to see it again.
How or why was Joanie (Toni Colette) getting an extra payment directly to her for her daughter’s tuition? Did she somehow arrange that on purpose or it was an accident and she just didn’t tell Harlan that he was paying double?
So invisible ink was the special way Linda (Jamie Lee Curtis) and Harlan communicated?
Yes, Joanie was explicitly double-dipping. She was receiving a payment directly from Harlan while the same payment was also going to Meg’s school. The implication was that her Goop-ish skin care company wasn’t a real functioning business, and she was surviving solely by this scheme. Meg’s realization that her mother didn’t actually have any money, and that therefore she’d be unable to keep going to school once they were out of the will, was the nudge it took to push her over to the dark side against Marta.
Invisible ink was the special means of communication between Linda and her father. She’d mentioned earlier that each kid had a sort of secret game with their dad; nice foreshadowing for this reveal. Of all of the kids, I found her the most sympathetic.
My comments:
Did Ransom somehow sabotage Marta’s car, so that he could provide the convenient escape from the mob of his relatives? We hadn’t seen any car trouble on her part before, and it never came up again. (Although the low-speed chase scene was hilarious.)
In a movie that’s explicitly set in modern times, with cell phones and such, it was a bit odd that the toxicology report wasn’t typed into a computer and stored in the cloud somewhere. Resorting to arson to tie up that loose end felt kind of old school. But worth it, I think.
In the final interrogation scene with Ransom, Le Blanc went through a lot of business of removing his jacket, rolling up his sleeves and tucking in his tie. I felt for sure this was going to lead up to a demonstration where he would inject himself with the “wrong” drug to prove a point, though I hadn’t quite pieced together how that would work. But then he reversed the process without an apparent point. Did I miss something here?
Maybe Ransom weakened the trellis just enough that Marta could end up breaking it even though she’s considerably lighter, but it’s a little bit of a stretch. Again, though, it was completely worth it for the best bit of physical comedy in the movie, when the dog runs by with the piece in its mouth.
I hope Marta hires Frank Oz to help look after her affairs. He seems like a good egg.
nm–misunderstood the scenario posited.
I think the movie should have ended with Marta going back into the house, closing the doors behind her, and pulling off a latex mask to reveal…
…Christopher Plummer.
I just saw it and thought it was excellent. The theater was packed and I missed a bit of the dialog because people were laughing. I’ll have to find Craig’s donut-hole-with-a-hole-in-it speech somewhere.
I figured out the crime pretty early, but I had the wrong suspect in mind.
I figured out that the vials of medicine had been switched, and that Marta had accidentally given Harlan the correct dose all along. I thought it was going to be Jamie Lee Curtis who did it. She was the only one who didn’t seem to have a motive. In the flashback to Harlan and Marta in his study, he says that he put all four of them in their place, but we’d only seen the details of three (Walt, Richard, and Joni) who had had confrontations with Harlan at the party. And JLC was the light sleeper who heard everyone going up and down the stairs, so she could have gone upstairs without anyone else making note of it.
I spotted that as well.
I knew I recognized the lawyer from somewhere, but I didn’t realize it was Frank Oz until the closing credits. I haven’t seen K Callan or M. Emmet Walsh in ages. And Joseph Gordon-Levitt was apparently in it, but I didn’t spot him at all.
And I want that house.
Gordon-Levitt provided the voice of the detective on the over the top murder show that Marta’s sister was watching on her laptop. So more like an Easter Egg than a cameo.
Very good movie. I was wondering where it was all going, after Marta told CSI KFC the whole story. I thought it bogged a bit during that point, but it all came together again. The ending was LOL funny. Especially the coffee cup.
And Chekhov’s Knife. 