- UK release: November 2019
- Director: Rian Johnson · Writer: Rian Johnson
- Studio / distributor: Lionsgate; MRC; T-Street
- Genre: Mystery comedy / whodunnit · Runtime: 130 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- Main cast: Daniel Craig (Skyfall, Logan Lucky) as Benoit Blanc; Ana de Armas (Blade Runner 2049) as Marta Cabrera; Chris Evans (Captain America: The First Avenger, Snowpiercer) as Ransom Drysdale; Jamie Lee Curtis (Halloween, True Lies) as Linda Drysdale
- Rotten Tomatoes: 97% critics / 92% audience · My rating: 8.5 / 10
The country-house murder mystery is one of the oldest furniture pieces in popular fiction, and for decades it has mostly sat in the corner gathering dust, wheeled out for a Sunday-night television adaptation and little else. Rian Johnson, fresh from the most divisive Star Wars film in a generation, has decided to drag it back into the middle of the room and give it a proper polish. Knives Out is his answer to anyone who wondered whether the man who broke Looper into clever knots could do something warm, funny and built for a crowd. He can, and the result is the most purely enjoyable thing he has made.
The setup
Harlan Thrombey, an enormously wealthy crime novelist, is found dead the morning after his eighty-fifth birthday party, his throat cut, the official verdict suicide. The local police are ready to close the book until a private detective with an improbable name and an even more improbable drawl, Benoit Blanc, turns up uninvited, paid by an anonymous client to take a second look. The Thrombey clan, gathered for the celebration, is a nest of resentments, debts and entitlements, every one of them with a reason to want the old man gone. Threading through all of it is Marta, Harlan’s young nurse, who knows more than she is saying and has a physical inability to lie that the plot puts to ruthless use. Johnson hands us the shape of what happened surprisingly early, then spends the rest of the film letting the tension come from watching it play out rather than from a final-act conjuring trick.
The cast
This is an ensemble film, and the casting is its first great pleasure. Daniel Craig, visibly delighted to be off the Bond leash, gives Blanc a syrupy Foghorn Leghorn accent and the air of a man enjoying his own cleverness a beat too openly. It should be insufferable and instead it is the comic engine of the film. Ana de Armas anchors everything as Marta, the only decent person in a house full of vipers, and she carries the emotional weight without ever tipping into sentiment. Chris Evans, shrugging off a decade of Captain America wholesomeness, is gleeful as the spoilt black-sheep grandson Ransom, all cable-knit and contempt. Around them Jamie Lee Curtis, Michael Shannon, Toni Collette and Don Johnson sketch a family of beautifully observed monsters, each given just enough room to be funny and awful in their own particular register. Nobody is wasted, and nobody is straining.
The craft
Johnson writes as well as he directs, and the screenplay is the real machinery here: a clockwork thing that keeps revealing it has more gears than you thought, without ever cheating the audience. Steve Yedlin’s camera prowls the Thrombey mansion, a wonderful pile stuffed with daggers, taxidermy and that now-famous ring of knives, until the house itself feels like a suspect. Nathan Johnson’s score does the playful, strings-led work the genre asks for. What lifts it above pastiche is the class commentary running underneath the parlour game: a film about inherited wealth and who actually does the work, sharp enough to draw blood but never so pleased with itself that it forgets to entertain. The 130 minutes move briskly, the jokes land, and the construction rewards a second viewing more than most thrillers manage.
How it stacks up
The obvious ancestors are Agatha Christie and the gleeful chaos of Clue, and Johnson clearly loves both, but he is doing something a little slyer than homage. Where the classic whodunnit keeps its cards face down until the drawing-room reveal, Knives Out shows much of its hand and dares you to keep watching anyway. It is closer in spirit to the inverted mysteries of Columbo than to Murder on the Orient Express, and it shares with Johnson’s own Brick and Looper a delight in taking a rigid genre and finding the loose thread to pull. Against the recent run of glossy, star-stuffed Christie adaptations it feels alive in a way they do not, because it has a point of view as well as a puzzle.
Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have been close to unanimous, sitting around 97%, and for once the audience is right there with them at 92%. The praise lands on the same things: the wit, the ensemble, the elegance of the construction, and the welcome novelty of a mid-budget original made for grown-ups in a year of franchises. I am with the consensus, though I would temper it slightly. The film is a touch in love with its own cleverness, and the political asides occasionally nudge the satire when a lighter touch would have cut deeper. These are small complaints about a film that does almost everything it sets out to do.
Verdict
Knives Out is the rare crowd-pleaser that respects the crowd, a proper film for grown-ups that trusts you to keep up and rewards you for doing so. It is funny, it is clever, it is gorgeously mounted, and it is the kind of mystery you will happily watch again knowing the answer, just to catch how the trick was set up. It loses a fraction for the moments when its smartness shows, and it is more delicious than deep, but as an evening’s entertainment it is close to faultless. The most fun I have had in a cinema this year. 8.5⁄10.
Availability: On general release in UK cinemas now.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: the film was a sizeable hit, enough that Netflix bought the rights to two sequels and Benoit Blanc became a franchise. Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022) moved the detective to a Greek island and a different set of awful rich people, trading the country-house cosiness for sun and satire; a third film followed it onto streaming. The original has settled into its reputation as the film that single-handedly proved there was still a healthy audience for the mid-budget, star-led original. It now streams on Amazon Prime Video in the UK depending on the month, and is widely available on disc and digital.
BBFC content advice
Rated 12A by the BBFC on its 2019 cinema release for moderate violence, threat, infrequent strong language. The fuller content notes below are taken from the BBFC’s subsequent 15-rated home-entertainment classification, which carries the consumer advice line brief bloody images, moderate sex and suicide references, strong language. They may contain spoilers.
Language: There is infrequent strong language (‘f**k’), as well as milder bad language including uses of ‘bitch’, ‘prick’, ‘asshole’, ‘son-of-a-bitch’, ‘screwed’, ‘shit’, ‘hell’, ‘ass’, ‘damn’, ‘Jesus’, ‘God’ and ‘goddamn’, and a rude middle finger gesture.
Sex: There are moderate verbal references to masturbation and marital infidelity.
Injury detail: There is the implication of a knife being drawn across a character’s throat, and subsequent brief images of the bloody consequences.
Suicide and self-harm: There are references to a character committing suicide, with details provided by the police of the method used and the injury sustained.
Additional issues: There are also references to the misuse of medical drugs.
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
