What a delightful movie.
My wife smuggled in candy, and we forgot to eat it. The movie was just that engrossing.
Ransom trying to murder Harlan was sort of a coincidence, in that I don’t think it was part of Harln’s plan. But it was not strictly random: it was caused by the changes made to the will. And the same motivation that led Harlan to change the will, led to him wanting to coverup for Marta, to the point of staging (scratch that, committing) a suicide. I think it was the story about the mother that was contrived, by Harlan, because he alone (between him and Marta) knew that she was due to inherit when he died, but only if she wasn’t found liable for his death. That was his real reason for the rush to suicide: he didn’t want to die of a morphine overdose, which an autopsy would show, and then have his whole plan to disinherit his family (for their own good) be thrown into disarray.
It was established in the dialogue later that even if Marta hadn’t been convicted of a crime, she would have lost the inheritance to the family if found liable in civil court. Which she almost certainly would have been, if Harlan had just been found dead the next morning with no sign of trauma. An autopsy would have (or so he feared) shown a morphine overdose, and Marta would have been blamed. Even if she beat the charges (or if there were no charges) she’d have been the most likely (and therefore apt to be found liable in civil court) source of the OD.
So, to sum it up, I wouldn’t call either Harlan’s death or his rush to suicide to be coincidental with the will, but rather part of the same causal chain, intersecting at the will. His suicide was a desperate attempt to deflect blame away from Marta, by hopefully preventing the coroner from zeroing in on the morphine overdose which he believed he was about to die from, and so ensure that his family was forced to make their own way in life, out from under the shadow of his wealth. Ransom’s attempted murder of Harlan, too, was caused by the will and his sour grapes at the thought of having to make his own future, not merely coincidental with it.
ETA: Oh, and I loved the movie. I left the theater even more convinced that TLJ was a failure of production and studio influence, rather than of writing or directing on its own (that is, to the extent the screenplay was whole of holes and contrivances is, I’m fairly well satisfied it was due to a need to force in certain set pieces, rather than a single writer/director’s true vision).
I enjoyed it a lot too. I liked that the film reveals what has happened in the middle and naturally you wonder how much of it is true and it turns out it mostly is but there are enough twists and extra reveals that surprise you towards the end. I also like the fact that it didn’t go for some massive twist like the Usual Suspects or Sixth Sense. The twist is interesting enough without blowing your mind and that is just fine.
Along the way there is of course a lot of terrific acting and writing to entertain you scene by scene.
After Looper I think this film establishes Johnson as one of the best writers-directors in Hollywood today. I was meh on Last Jedi but I think those two films are a much better reflection of Johnson’s skills. Since this film has been a big boxoffice success I hope Johnson comes back to this genre but only after he has a script every bit as good.
I might have missed something early in the movie. When the police are interviewing family members the first time, Daniel Craig is in the shadows hitting a piano key after certain answers. Was there any clue in this action or was this just a mechanism to introduce the character? I don’t remember what answers prompted this action, anything meaningful?
It’s interesting that this movie would be very difficult to spoil, if you think about it. It’s not like “Kevin Spacey is Keyser Soze” or “Bruce Willis is dead the whole time.”
To spoil Knives Out, you’d basically have to explain the entire set-up with the swapped vials, the convoluted suicide plot, the nurse’s exit and secret reentry. And then you’d have to explain the switched labels, the arson, etc etc etc.
It would be easier to say “Just go see it.”
Yes. That Rian Johnson is a clever bastard, I’ll give you that. It’d be like spoiling Grave of the Fireflies by telling someone that both the kids die in the end.
Because they do.
But then you know that, because it begins with the older brother dying and his ghost joining that of his younger sister.
It’s literally the first scene in the movie. In fact, I think the first line of dialogue (apart from some background chatter at the train station) is voiceover narration, “September 27th, 1945. That was the day I died.”
I might be off about the exact day, though.
Definitely not Brazil; they speak Spanish here and there but no Portuguese.
Just came from watching it in the theater (UK). There were several shared laughs; The Most Dangerous Old Woman In The World got one of the biggest ones.
The movie definitely reminded me of Agatha Christie’s mysteries in the amount of twists and turns but, unlike some if not all of Ms. Christie’s work, this one actually gives you every bit and piece. There’s some of the biggest twists I’d figured much earlier: if the general acting had been clumsier, Harland being fine after getting a megadose of morphine would have been believable but with the general level of acting and having seen people on morphine… nope. That wasn’t someone having any kind of high levels of it in their system.
Every time he does that is right after they’ve told a doozie. “We all arrived about 8” (but that person had actually been there a bit earlier) doesn’t get a note, because depending on how you interpret “about” it’s true; “Harlan wanted to talk about his geraniums” (not an actual line, I just took it from my left elbow) would have gotten a note.
Fantastic movie! Very well crafted, and terrific performances to boot. Rian Johnson should be very proud – this is one of the all-time great film murder mysteries, IMO.
I saw an article that talked about that. Both of the actresses who portrayed Marta and her mother were Cuban, so the director thought about making the character Cuban as well, but that wouldn’t have worked because a Cuban in the US wouldn’t fear deportation.
But yes, the point of the confusion over Marta’s country of origin was to make clear that none of the Thrombeys cared enough to find out. (Although I’ll bet that Harlan Thrombey knew, because he would actually have talked to her.)
Does anybody remember the medication that Marta “mixed up” with the morphine, and does anyone know what it is used for? Harlan is clearly quite ill, possibly nearing death - people don’t have in-home nursing care just for kicks (he already had a housekeeper), and certainly don’t have saline locks in their hand because they like the way they look. I’m thinking that Harlan had already planned to kill himself when he felt that the time had come, and that the opportunity to cover up Marta’s “mistake” just caused him to move the schedule up a bit. Who knows, maybe he was going to do it that night anyway when all of his asshole family was in the house…
I believe the label was Ketorolac (Toradol). It’s a NSAID pain-killer. He really shouldn’t have been on it long-term, but wasn’t there some dialog about him being post-surgery. That could also explain why he had a IV lock. Of course the 3mg dosage is wrong too, unless he’s on some sort of micro-dose. 30mg would have been right (or did I hear the dialog wrong?).
The actual drug doesn’t really matter, of course, but the fact that he probably would have had some pretty strong immediate symptoms if he were really hit with 100mg of Morphine should have tipped him (and Marta) off to the fact that something wasn’t right with the bottles.
Marta was specifically giving him small doses of “the good stuff”.
I wish we could get a doctor to weigh in on this. I thought the effects of morphine OD were rapid.
The movie presents it like he had ten minutes to live, but at 9 minutes 50 seconds you couldn’t tell, but ten seconds later you keel over dead. I think he should have been feeling the effects before he got around to slitting his throat.
Of course, it would have been a lot simpler to set things up so it looks like Harlan committed suicide… by taking a morphine overdose. Have Marta say she stepped out of the room for a moment and Harlan filled the syringe and shot himself up. Then have her “panic”, run downstairs and wake the household to get family members to call 911 and at least one family member to come upstairs, have Harlan talk to them briefly and describe how he OD’ed on purpose… of course, things get a bit awkward when he doesn’t die, but it seemed more plausible than the version he came up with.
Marta might have been found negligent (and therefore be unable to inherit) by (1) leaving the morphine where Harlan could access it and (2) “losing” her Narcan.
The more I think about it the more I am convinced that Harlan was planning suicide anyway. He told Ransom about the change to the will, probably in an attempt to goad Ransom to try something stupid that would get him locked up. But there is no way that would remain secret if Harlan survived the night and his loving children would have ample opportunity to move legally (possibly by having him declared incompetent) against the will change. He could leave them no time to act.
There is the scene where he pulls the knife partway out of its sheath while saying his kids couldn’t tell a real knife from a stage prop. During that scene I remember him staring at the knife far longer than just to make a point about how stupid his children are.
I also think Harlan was well aware that he didn’t receive a fatal morphine overdose and figured that Ransom had switched the drugs. But Marta was in a panic and didn’t notice, so Harlan had to concoct the plan to push the time of death to past when Marta left.
Need to watch again.
That’d be quite a leap on his part. Marta’s freaking because she’s just given him a large injection of the drug labeled “Morphine”. He has no reason to doubt that she has indeed done this, and if he thought the drug was mislabeled in some way, he’d know that her prediction of his imminent demise was possibly in error.
Plus if he thought Ransom had indeed killed him, he should have warned her about Ransom since it’s just as likely he’d kill her too. Actually, if Ransom though the tox report would implicate Marta, why doesn’t he kill her, make it look like another suicide or accident? If he hadn’t been arrested, would he have gone with her to the 10 a.m. meeting with the housekeeper, and why was the housekeeper still alive two hours after her earlier meeting with Ransom if an overdose of Morphine is such a speedy path to death?
I like this movie and I’m sure I’ll watch it again myself at some point, but the main mystery is a tad too convoluted and contrived. It might have been better as full black-comedy farce where there were multiple family members trying independently to kill Harlan and only Marta, purely by accident, succeeds.
The intended dosages were 100mg of the “normal” med and 3mg of morphine.
With my theory he was expecting Ransom to do something after he told Ransom about the will leaving everything to Marta.
Okay… though I suggest this tends to shift the movie from the genre of murder mystery to Ocean’s 11-style heist flick, where characters have near-psychic ability to predict what other characters will do and when they will do it down to the millisecond and there are plans within plans within plans within plans. One quickly reaches a point where Harlan knew that Ransom would switch the bottles and Ransom knew that Marta wouldn’t read the labels anyway (because she can tell the drugs apart by touch), and Harlan knew that Ransom knew this, and Ransom knew that Harlan knew that Ransom knew and Marta didn’t know that Ransom knew Harlan knew what Ransom knew what Marta didn’t know…
I thought Craig was hitting the piano key every time the discussion wandered off from the actual murder and into side issues.
I would like to know in the first place, how Marta was denied the right to attend the funeral. Couldn’t she have just shown up? And who was it in the family who told her not to come? Everybody kept telling her they were outvoted.
They were all lying.