Knives Out

I spend most of my working days immersed in the crime genre. At secondary school we teach Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sign of Four to Year 10’s and J.B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls to Year 11’s. Crime outsells every other type of book in this country. 18.7 million fiction books were sold in 2017. There’s also a glut of dramas on TV that pertain to criminal investigation: last night we finished watching Deadwater Fell, starring David Tennant and Cush Jumbo, which promised much and delivered a little. More or less every night on terrestrial there is some kind of detective drama, from the escapist Death in Paradise to the bleak Silent Witness. It can be sunny, rainy, frothy or strong; regardless, it’s omnipresent.


In cinema, however, whodunnits don’t really get a look in. Possibly because television and books have cornered the market, producers feel there’s no money in film. TV and books have overturned the piggy bank, leaving Tinseltown with a pig they can’t take to market. Sure, Kenneth Branagh brought back Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express to some acclaim – but that was a re-make. Yes, Adam Sandler’s Murder Mystery was the most watched film on Netflix – but that was Netflix where discernment comes cheap.

More people watched this than that Eric and Ernie Xmas special your grandparents tell you about.

Rian Johnson’s Knives Out is a bold move. He has brought together an all-star cast for a murder mystery. This is more in keeping with the Hollywood of yore or BBC of today, than the current trend for prequels, sequels and reboots. Although it’s inspired by Agatha Christie, its themes and characters are thoroughly modern. This is a two headed Janus: it looks forward; it looks back.


It begins with a body. Harlan Thrombey is discovered by Fran, the housekeeper. His throat has been slit; he lies in a pool of blood. It looks like suicide, but what worth appearance in detective fiction! A week after Thrombey’s demise and we’re in a kitchen. A young woman is watching CSI, something her mother berates her for: ‘They're talking about murder on it, your sister just had a friend she loves slit his throat open she doesn't need to be hearing that right now let's be sensitive!’ This gets to the nub of what makes Knives Out so beguiling. How great is that scene at establishing the tone of the piece! There’s the intertextual reference to CSI (there’s nods to Sherlock, Poirot and Sleuth too); there’s the ironic humour of a mother calling for sensitivity when her language is anything but, and the subtle establishment of a connection: we’re wondering how a young woman became a close friend to an eighty-five-year-old. Good scriptwriting is more than text; it’s subtext and tone too.

Was suicide his birthday wish? Pic. Lionsgate

We then learn that the sister who has lost the friend is Marta. She is called by Harlan’s son to appear at the house. It becomes clear that she was the nurse of the deceased, hence their close relationship. On arriving in her shitty Subcompact car, she’s greeted with an apology. Linda, Harlan’s eldest daughter, expresses remorse she was not invited to the funeral. She made her case, but in her words, ‘I was outvoted.’ This line is returned with each sibling taking it in turns to say it. In this film it’s not just the plotting of procedural that's great, it’s the spacing of jokes too.


Marta has been called because the detectives have been called in. Initially, it was assumed this was a suicide. Until a note turned up, claiming it wasn’t. Detective Benoit Blanc is having his wages paid for by this anonymous sender. Assisting him are two official officers, the straight-faced Detective Eliot and the crime enthusiast Trooper Wagner. As Thrombey was a crime writer, Wagner fanboys his way through the film, stealing scenes along the way. 


In the first round of interviews, Blanc stays in the background, punctuating the end of each testimony with a note on the piano. He is a man that does everything with a flourish. Over the course of the picture, he moves forward in the frame and the investigation, wondering why an earth an elderly man, with reasonable health, would turn on himself. Daniel Craig is wonderful here, enjoying his Deep South accent immensely. Like a Kentucky Fried Poirot, he delights in his words and revels in its cadences. It reminds you that Craig’s acting ability extends beyond sultry.

Making notes. Pic. Lionsgate

With Blanc unhappy with the morsels the family are feeding him, he turns to Marta for assistance. He soon ascertains that she has a physical reaction to lying. Whenever her mouth deviates from the truth, karmic acid is propelled from her stomach forthwith. The resultant vomit outs her as a liar. Blanc leans on this weakness to find out more about the family. Like in An Inspector Calls there’s satire at play with Marta, a working-class woman, rubbing up against the privileged Thrombey household. All through the film her origins are confused: each character believing she’s from a different place (Ecuador and Paraguay being just two South American names). Like in Get Out, Johnson is highlighting the insidiousness of liberal prejudice: the patronizing idea that it’s enough to welcome colour into your home whilst continuing to see the world as black and white. When things do eventually get difficult for the Thrombey’s, they’re willing to throw Marta under the border to protect their privilege.


Like all great detective stories, the film throws you every which way. By the halfway mark, it seems as though the mystery is revealed. Johnson soon smashes the glass on these light bulbs, introducing further shocks, further surprises. Much like a magician, there's misdirection and subterfuge at work. Narrators aren't to be trusted at the best of times. Crime narrators even less. They are as slippery as their characters. By the end the mental exercise of keeping up will leave you exhausted - exhilarated too.

It’s more than the cast that make Knives Out worthy of the big screen. Its plotting might be a homage to golden cinema, its tone though is completely modern. Its detective may be from a bygone age, yet the suspects exist in our world. Its physical setting is yester-year; however, its political context is now. Johnson uses a classic framework to challenge today's problems. He is no doughnut. He is a very clever man.


Knives Out is still on in some cinemas.