Knives Out

Knives Out is exactly the sort of murder mystery that makes you want to immediately watch it again once it ends. The first time you are trying to work out what is happening. The second time you realise Rian Johnson has basically been showing you the answer the whole way through and trusting you not to notice.

The smartest move is revealing what looks like the solution surprisingly early. At first it almost feels disappointing because you think the whodunit has been taken away from you. Then the film keeps going and you realise that was never the whole game. It changes what you are watching without killing the mystery, which is much harder to pull off than it looks.

Ana de Armas is the heart of the film as Marta. She is surrounded by a family full of people who keep insisting they care about her while barely knowing anything about her. Even the running joke about nobody remembering which country her family comes from tells you everything you need to know about them. Marta works because she is not trying to outsmart everybody. She is just trying to do the right thing, and that ends up being the thing that keeps moving her towards the truth.

Christopher Plummer is fantastic as Harlan. The scene where Marta believes she has accidentally given him the wrong medication should be ridiculous on paper, but both performances make it genuinely upsetting. Harlan staying calm while Marta is panicking tells you more about their relationship than a massive speech ever could.

Daniel Craig's Benoit Blanc takes a few minutes to get used to because that accent comes flying out of nowhere, but once you settle into it he is brilliant. Jamie Lee Curtis, Michael Shannon, Toni Collette and Chris Evans all get enough to make the family feel properly horrible in their own different ways. Evans in particular looks like he is having the time of his life being smug.

The film is packed with tiny details that become much better on a rewatch. Harlan talks about how someone could swap medication. He says Ransom cannot tell a real knife from a prop. The grandmother mistakes Marta for Ransom. Even little background details like the baseball and the letter eventually matter. None of it feels like the film stopping to point at the clue and shouting that you should remember it.

My only real problem is Fran's part of the plan. Going alone to blackmail somebody you believe has committed murder in an abandoned building is one of those horror movie decisions where you want to reach through the screen and tell them to stop. It is a small bit of convenience in an otherwise ridiculously well put together script.

By the time everything is revealed, the best part is that the answer feels obvious because the film earned it. It did not hide the solution. It hid it in plain sight.