Knives Out, the new film from writer/director Rian Johnson, bills itself as a whodunit. That’s more than fair. It wears the traditional framework very neatly. The story begins when a wealthy patriarch is found in his study, dead of a knife wound to the throat. All the guests at his estate (his various relatives and housekeepers) have reasons for wanting him killed. There are virtually no clues. There is no way anyone could have made it into his chamber to do the deed. And so a brilliant detective shows up on the scene to help the police investigate the crime—a crime which is, at this point, totally unsolvable.
There are twists and turns and tweed and a very satisfying ending. It’s set sometime during autumn in a cozy Massachusetts town. The detective who shows up on the case has a thick accent and is a celebrity. The baroque mansion is full of passageways and wood-paneling. All of the guests are protecting their own dark secrets. Indeed, Knives Out seems to be the perfect whodunit; it checks every possible box associated with the genre, denoting a stylistic mystery lineage and then enthusiastically participating. The film acknowledges many of its canonical forefathers—the mansion is likened to a “Clue board,” a character jokes that the detective’s Southern accent means he belongs in CSI: KFC, someone in the background watches a police procedural (whose drama is exaggerated for comic effect), the detective picks a helper and calls her his “Watson,” and, most importantly, the victim is Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer), an octogenarian, best-selling mystery novelist with his own publishing house and liquid assets totaling $60 million. A mystery novelist, for crying out loud! The victim is a mystery novelist! The film is, for lack of a better word, a “fan” of the genre.
The film wages that the most important thing about this genre is not the question “who done it?” but the adjoining accusation: not the fact that someone is guilty, but the fact that other, innocent people are conveniently blamed.But Knives Out’s adherence to hallmarks of the whodunit isn’t parody or even pastiche. And the film’s eagerness and self-awareness about joining the murder mystery pantheon might seem to portend a dull story—a regurgitative derivation, or a worshipful imitation, or something else well-meaning but unoriginal. But it doesn’t. Knives Out is cleverer than its reverence lets on. Its enthusiasm is not exactly a trick (it is very sincere), but it does allow for a degree of underestimation. What Knives Out really is, is subversive. Virtually everything about the film, and its set up, is a trick. I won’t spoil anything about the plot (this is a murder mystery, after all!). But the fact that Knives Out is something of a wolf in sheep’s clothing, in terms of its narrative, underscores how it helpfully undoes, understands, and repurposes the genre which it wants so badly to inhabit.
It flips the thematic expectation of the genre, making the mystery plot secondary to the giant metaphor it provides. The film wages that the most important thing about this genre is not the question “who done it?” but the adjoining accusation: not the fact that someone is guilty, but the fact that other, innocent people are conveniently blamed.
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For reasons I’m not going to tell you, the film’s protagonist becomes not the brilliant detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) or the two police detectives on the case (LaKeith Stanfield and Noah Segan), but the woman whose help they request: Marta Cabrera (Ana de Armas), the smart, young, kindly nurse hired by Harlan Thrombey to take care of him. English is her second language. She knows the deceased better than anyone, and she also has a biological inability to lie. She becomes our heroine amid a sea of investigators and squabbling relatives. And she is alternatingly welcomed by and expelled from the WASPy Thrombey brood on their terms. She is coaxed from the sidelines of the family room into a conversation when Harlan’s son-in-law Richard Drysdale (Don Johnson) wants to use her as an example of someone born in Latin America who has ‘followed the law and immigrated correctly’—having entered the country legally through hard work, rather than, say, as a refugee. Marta’s mother, who is living in the United States illegally, is threatened with being exposed and then deported by Harlan’s son Walt (Michael Shannon, creepy as ever), when Marta comes into possession of something he wants.
The family patronizingly promises they will always ‘take care’ of Marta, when she is unemployed following Harlan’s death, until Marta makes a fateful discovery and offers assistance to the family, instead—making an offer which gives her power and so turns them resentful. And when Marta is revealed as being essential to the investigation around Harlan’s murder (a process which will surely jeopardize the privacy and integrity of the family), she is treated as though she is taking what rightfully belongs to them, this group of patrician white people. They are all for equality while she remains their powerless employee; her ‘work ethic’ is considered a virtue to the family only as long as it services them. Otherwise, Marta is a threat to their position. She is a threat to their homeland. She must, the family rationalizes, want what they have; it’s a “the butler always does it” for a new, hateful political age. (Through this, it’s worth pointing out that though Marta’s character is highly symbolic, she is much more than the film’s ringer metaphor.)
Knives Out becomes, rather quickly, not a movie that revels in the timeless genre of the whodunit, but a critique of a very specific historical moment: the Trump era in America, particularly emphasizing the cruel immigration policies along the Southern border, mass deportation efforts, and rampant racism and racial exclusion. The family, moreover, is revealed not to be a who’s-who of mystery archetypes (as might be expected from this ingenue-mystery), but a collection of different types of problematic people of power: Richard, with his pro-immigrant-work-ethic bombast and insistence that he’s not racist just because he believes everyone should become American citizens the ‘right way’ (“Immigrants! We get the job done!” he yells at one point, quoting Hamilton, which he brags about having seen at The Public); Walt, a kind of gross Large Adult Son who expects a business dynasty to fall into his lap; Linda (Jamie Lee Curtis), a “self-made” real-estate tycoon who cares about social justice only as much as it does not get in the way of building her company ; Ransom (Chris Evans), an ex-frat-boy-style trust fund kid who ignores smart women until they become useful to him; Joni (Toni Collette), a hippie-ish, liberal-presenting middle-aged social-media influencer and skincare developer whose screams of “there are kids in cages!” mute when her own privilege might vanish; Meg (Katherine Langford), a feminist college-student whose principles and commitment to sisterhood disappear when she might have to take on debt to pay for her own education; and, Jacob (Jaeden Martell), a young alt-right internet troll in a prep-school blazer who won’t get off his phone and who calls people “snowflake” when he feels defensive.
The film’s opening shots, of a housekeeper named Fran (Edi Patterson) looking for Thrombey through the mansion while the rest of the family sleeps, involve cuts to a series of gargoylish masks and statues placed around the house. These are the bodies we see before any of the family’s—this ghoulish assemblage of leering creatures. Rather than echo a classic whodunit, this moment harks, a little bit, to that one classic Twilight Zone episode, in which a wealthy, dying man makes his vulture-like relatives wear grotesque masks that reflect their true, vile personalities, in order to receive their inheritances from him. The monstrous collection of stiff bodies we see in these first few moments tells us all we need to know about this beastly congregation.
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As invested as Knives Out is in exposing the culprit masterminding the mystery at hand, it’s more invested in exposing more realistic villains. The film starts out inside an alternate reality that resembles a classic mystery story. Literary-seeming detectives like Blanc are established as part of this universe; the family actually knows about him from reading a profile about him in The New Yorker—“the last of the Gentleman sleuths,” he’s called. But the film ends up firmly in a kind of “real life,” one in which Donald Trump is president and immigrant families are in danger of destruction at the whims of a system that only benefits the white and rich. That the Thrombeys variously believe themselves to be allies to the less-privileged or marginalized only makes their selfishness and wickedness feel more true-to-life (Knives Out is not specifically unique in this specific indictment—Get Out made this argument explicitly in 2017).
Knives Out is very clear that these kind of dynastic families should lose their power, but it’s loudest about the kinds of shady characters that hide in plain sight, professing to be allies (disguised as wealthy boomers reading famed liberal-cultural magazine The New Yorker, for example) to an inclusive system that plans to share power, resources, and rights up and down the ladder and across demographics, as long as it is convenient for them (no one in the family, for example, can get Marta’s nationality correct). The most dangerous character in the film might be Meg, who spouts sharp feministy-comebacks and leaves her grandfather’s party early to go visit some friends at Smith College and is legitimately friends with Marta, but who retreats back into her family’s mindset when all hell breaks loose. Meg is the perfect embodiment of a young White Feminist, perhaps more damaging than her INCEL-ish cousin Jacob and misogynistic bro cousin Ransom, because it seems for a naive moment like she might actually help collapse the hegemonic order at work. But she ultimately becomes its most important supporter.
Harlan Thrombey, himself (heartrendingly, delightfully acted by Plummer), comes to represent a longstanding system of influence and control that rejects the privileged descendants it has begotten, needing to die for this rejection to be fully meaningful and for a new, more productive world order to be born. His death is a sacrifice, it can prevent the ascension of his terrible family—from a ‘body-politic’ angle, it might help save America. That he is a mystery writer, the personification of genre that fundamentally requires and celebrates the illumination of Truth and the prevailing of Justice, gives this extra weight. Never before in a mystery movie, I’ll wager, does the victim’s death have so much useful symbolic weight.
Knives Out smartly situates itself in a subgenre that involves a lot of finger-pointing. The Thrombeys, in their excitement to get what they feel they deserve (and get out of what they feel they don’t), reveal their comfort with scapegoating (“alienating,” if you will forgive the pun) various “unworthy,” non-native figures for ruining their fatherland and for taking opportunities away from them, opportunities they feel they have rightful, ancestral claims to. They are quick to answer the film’s “whodunit” classification with a ubiquitous, othering, accusatory response of “them,” one which is directed specifically at Marta and everything she generally represents: non-white people (specifically, in this political moment, Latin-American immigrants), the working-class, and women.
The film’s defensive-sounding title is the first and last sharp point it makes—that taking on a thorny, rotting system like the Thrombey family sovereignty isn’t easy, and won’t happen without a big fight, or at the very least, screaming bloody murder.
