Knives Out

There is a sec­ond hand book shop on London’s Char­ring Cross Road and adja­cent to its front door is a shelf – some might call it a shrine – ded­i­cat­ed to the work of crime writ­ing doyenne, Agatha Christie. There are, we assume, shrines just like this in shops and homes across the entire globe. Your hand moves in one direc­tion, and before it reach­es one of the many, ear­ly and vin­tage edi­tions, it darts off in anoth­er. Where to begin with this gigan­tic and gigan­ti­cal­ly influ­en­tial lit­er­ary corpus?

You could always take the fun option of going to see Rian Johnson’s sparkling fifth direc­to­r­i­al fea­ture, Knives Out, which is that rare beast: an exact­ing, affec­tion­ate homage that also deliv­ers thrills, spills and meaty sub­text in its own right. On the dock­et we have a big old Goth­ic stack with a bunch of secret doors, an obscene cash inher­i­tance, a bit­ter­ly feud­ing and snob­bish­ly enti­tled fam­i­ly (Jamie Lee Cur­tis, Don John­son, Michael Shan­non, Chris Evans, Toni Colette) and their wily but empa­thet­ic Lati­no maid (Ana de Armas).

And then there’s the harsh but fair patri­arch Har­lan Thrombey (Christo­pher Plum­mer), a world-famous crime writer who lords over every­one with his impos­ing bari­tone, whose judge­ment is final and whose throat is cut with an orna­men­tal dag­ger. His mer­ry pranks play out from beyond the grave as the bereaved rel­a­tives claw mer­ci­less­ly for that mas­sive, unearned finan­cial windfall.

In the back­ground, and very much main­tain­ing a tab on all the minute machi­na­tions and obscure motives, is Daniel Craig ​’s crack­er­jack pri­vate detec­tive Benoit Blanc, whose vel­vety Louisiana drawl affirms both his out­sider sta­tus and the film’s firm com­mit­ment to iron­ic tom­fool­ery. To explore even the most super­fi­cial of plot details would be futile, as this is a tale root­ed in deep and sol­id con­tex­tu­al foun­da­tions, where every char­ac­ter has their own intri­cate back­sto­ry which serves to detain them in the spot­light of guilt for longer than they want to be there.

But John­son is not con­tent to reheat and re-serve the same old hoary genre cliché́s played at an arch remove. Instead he opts to shift the who­dun­nit goal­posts at every oppor­tu­ni­ty, so at the point you think you know where all this is head­ed, you real­ly don’t. Knives Out is less inter­est­ed in the ins­ta-grat­i­fi­ca­tion of col­lar­ing the cul­prit than it is air­ing out a lot of dirty laundry.

The plot whips along at such a pace you can feel the wind in your face, but it is also so tight that you nev­er feel the need to even once glance back. There are small digres­sions in the film which ally it with the polit­i­cal now, such as a veiled argu­ment about Trump and the fact that one of the younger off­spring is an alt-right troll.

Yet de Armas’ kind­ly Mar­ta finds her­self at the cen­tre of all this mur­der­ous squab­bling – an immi­grant whose tire­less work eth­ic and right­eous moral roadmap is only noticed by the one man who isn’t around to pro­tect her.

If there’s a crit­i­cism, it’s that the Thrombey clan are all a lit­tle one note, and they are all sin­gu­lar­ly dri­ven by their forth­right polit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic iden­ti­ties, and thus a lit­tle too pre­dictable for com­fort. Still, John­son just keeps on push­ing until a breath­less finale is then capped off with a clos­ing shot which adds a deli­cious final twist of the knife.