Knives Out (2019, PG-13)

This is a movie whose trailer flashed its stacked cast and ambience at you, and while I didn’t rush out to see it opening weekend, I did grab the chance to catch it fairly early in its run. An interesting murder-mystery yarn that goes some places I wasn’t expecting and features a lot of terrific people doing nice work.

When renowned murder-mystery writer Harlan Thrombey apparently commits suicide on the night of his 85^th birthday, the family, already recently assembled for his party, gathers together again, first to mourn the loss of their patriarch and second to meet the probing eye of one Benoit Blanc, a well-respected private detective hired anonymously to investigate Harlan’s death. Naturally, everyone has something they’re hiding, and it’s up to Blanc to determine if any of those secrets add up to murder. In the middle, caught between the eccentric detective and the wealthy bereaved family, is Harlan’s nurse Marta, the one who cares the most that he’s dead.

One thing I should point out is that this movie is rather deceptively advertised. The trailers highlighted the star-studded actors playing the Thrombeys, from Jamie Lee Curtis to Chris Evans to Toni Collette to Michael Shannon to Christopher Plummer as the deceased Harlan. Really, though, the movie isn’t about them. While they’re all well-cast and do fine jobs, they’re there more as pieces in the puzzle than characters in the story. More central is Daniel Craig as Benoit Blanc, who’s better-positioned in the proceedings (and who I wouldn’t be surprised to see turn up again in a new whodunit.) However, ultimately, this is the story of Marta, played by Ana de Armas. I wasn’t at all familiar with de Armas before seeing this movie, but she holds her own impressively against a number of Hollywood heavyweights.

I like that Marta is the main character we follow, the one who’s existed in the Thrombeys’ lives (“you’re one of the family!” they repeatedly insist to her) but isn’t one of them (“you should’ve been invited to the funeral – I was overruled,” they repeated confide to her.) She knows things because they speak in her presence forgetting that she’s there, and in the last years of Harlan’s life, she came to understand him better than any of them did. It’s an interesting vantage point for the story to follow, and it makes for an interesting focal point for the movie.

As for the mystery, there are some good twists and turns, and even if there are some developments I guessed along the way, it’s still fun to see how they play out. Similar to how the film defies expectations (and its own marketing) by centering around the cast member with the shortest resumé, it also goes against the grain of what I think of as the usual murder-mystery/whodunit format. I won’t get into any specifics, for the sake of spoilers, but the story bends in directions I don’t expect to, and that makes it easy to get invested. Although the movie is a little too long and definitely feels it at times, it’s an entertaining romp that revels in its own 21^st-century Agatha Christie-ness.

Warnings

Violence, sexual references, drinking/smoking, a little gross-out humor, and thematic elements.