Review - Knives Out (2019)

Directed by: Rian Johnson
Written by: Rian Johnson
Starring: Ana de Armas, Daniel Craig, Chris Evans
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Just as Rian Johnson's first film, Brick, celebrated the noir genre through a near-perfect reconstruction with a modern twist, Knives Out is a reminder of what makes mystery stories so fun and engaging, while updating the genre fare with a couple of brilliant and quirky ideas.

A rich murder mystery writer has slit his throat, but an anonymous client seems to think that there's more to this than suicide, and the eccentric detective (Craig) they've hired seems to agree, especially since every member of this man's avaricious family could be a suspect. To say more would be to give away too much of the story, and as it's a mystery that ruins the fun, but I do want to talk about a couple of things that may enter spoiler territory, so if you want to go in to the story unfettered by more, just skip to my summary and know that I absolutely recommend this film as one of the best of the year.

What makes Knives Out so utterly engaging is its choice of perspective: both whose we view the movie from and how such things can change. On its own, such a story would only be genre-savvy, but we see the story outside the perspective of the detective: the audience surrogate seems also the perpetrator, and such a decision elevates the film to new heights as it plays such a revelation both for tension and for humour in Johnson's own delightfully off-kilter way. But this idea of perspective shifting the meaning of the story gets taken even further in some of the film's more subtle touches. I love the way each family member, when telling the story of their father's birthday, imagine themselves by their father's side as the cake is placed in front of him, how treating his nurse as "one of the family" to some is little more than using them as an example as they postulate some racist tirade, to how nobody seems to be clear on where said nurse is even from, or who actually voted to not let her attend the funeral. The stories are so deliberately inconsistent, and while it can sometimes feel like very clever window dressing, it all ultimately plays back in to the key themes of the story.

All of this is of course helped immensely by the hammy, archetypal performances of the colourful cast. Everyone here commits to the slightly ridiculous and yet inalienable humanity of their characters; the family is filled with terrible people who behave excessively, but they're always strangely believable. I'd be here all day if I talked about every one of them, so know that each of them is worth talking about while I get in to a couple of my favourites. Jamie Lee Curtis is a highlight here as the eldest daughter, a delight to watch in the most extra of pink power suits, at once the apotheosis of all the greed and power-mongering that runs in the family, and yet the most clearly stricken by the death of her father. Her son, played by Chris Evans, is the most vindictive, uncaring, brutally sarcastic dickhead, and he definitely seems to be having the most fun in what is the second-most entertaining performance in the film. The only one that bests him is Craig's detective, Benoit Blanc, whose hilariously silly caricature of an accent is the mere icing on the doughnut of a man who simply cannot stop talking them by film's end; his is the purest form of puzzling joy that this movie goes for. That said, Ana de Armas is the heart and soul of this movie, her performance the closest to real to keep the audience in her head-space, with the clever juxtaposition of the flaws and strengths of her character reinforcing her most important moments: her caring and her inability to lie seen as weakness by the rest, the perfect foil to keep people on her side and yet perfectly inept to deal with this situation, and Armas handles each challenge excellently.

The Short Version: Cleverly written and masterfully framed, Knives Out supports a colourful cast of characters with a rollicking mystery story whose originality lies in its style of telling, twisting as much with its use of perspective as it does with its dizzying plot.

Rating: 8.5/10