Knives Out: A Perfect Mystery

Knives Out is the ideal Thanksgiving movie. The family of a famous crime novelist gets together for dinner, the patriarch dies in an apparent suicide but now the police suspect murder, and everyone is gathered back together in an Agatha Christie-esque black comedy to solve the mystery. It is simply sublime.

Written and directed by the astonishing Rian Johnson, this movie is a wonder. It is a twisty and intricately-plotted murder mystery that could easily be written up as a cozy and compelling novel. You are fed all the clues throughout the movie and have just as good a chance of solving the mystery as the private detective who has been anonymously hired to solve the case. But you will be having so much fun watching Daniel Craig swan around doing his best Foghorn Leghorn impression that you’ll be happy to leave the detecting up to him.

Aside from Craig, who plays the fabulously named Benoit Blanc, this movie boasts an all-star cast including Jamie Lee Curtis, Toni Collette, Don Johnson, Chris Evans, Lakeith Stanfield, Christopher Plummer, Michael Shannon, and the marvelous Ana de Armas, who plays the dead man’s kindhearted nurse (she is from Paraguay, Uruguay, or Brazil, depending on which clueless member of the family you speak to) and has to deal with the shenanigans of this insane family while harboring secrets of her own about what happened that night. Each character is weird and wacky in a very specific way; everyone has a motive, everyone is hiding something, and the plot keep twisting in on itself like some impossible Möbius strip until Blanc finally brings everyone together in a room and solves the mystery in a manner that would make Hercule Poirot proud.

Knives Out is a cinematic tour de force. The production design of the creepy house where the death takes place is impressive, with every corner stuffed with something eye-catching that contains a potential clue. The cast is clearly having the time of their life, playing up heightened emotions and extreme melodrama as this family turns out to be spectacularly dysfunctional. And the script is a bewildering beauty, crammed with jokes but also containing a deeply satisfying murder mystery that will keep you guessing until the final second. It reminded me of Clue, except it takes its central mystery very seriously and unravels it with aplomb. This is a movie that bears repeat viewing - even once you have the answers, you can re-watch to find all the clues you missed the first time around, giggle at all the jokes, and luxuriate in the warm glow of a movie that is absolutely perfect in every way.