![]() ![]() Helping to divine the nature of Harlan’s “manner of death” is gentleman sleuth Benoit Blanc, a cigar-smoking, coin-flipping interloper played with an outrageous southern US accent (Ransom calls him the “CSI-KFC”) by Daniel Craig. As for eldest daughter Linda (Jamie Lee Curtis in career-best form), she can’t help “thinking about Dad’s games” and “waiting for the big reveal…” Only Harlan’s nurse and carer Marta (Ana de Armas) appears above suspicion, blessed with a “regurgitative reaction to mistruths” that makes her vomit when lying. Or what about the ever-so-slightly snivelling Walt (Michael Shannon, playing against type), whose publishing fortune depended on his father’s faltering favour? Then there’s son-in-law Richard (Don Johnson), a Trumpy horror with a wandering eye and widowed lifestyle guru Joni (Toni Collette, channelling goopy Gwyneth Paltrow), both of whom had axes to grind. Perhaps black-sheep Ransom (Chris Evans, oozing privilege) did it – he was heard arguing with his grandfather that night. It looks like an open-and-shut suicide, but could one of Harlan’s variously leechy family members (witheringly described as a bunch of “self-made over-achievers”) have slit his throat? After all, the old man spent the evening settling old scores and “cleaning house”… Knives Out retains a beating human heart into which daggers are regularly plunged The setting is a gothic pile in modern-day New England where crime-writer Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer) has recently capped his 85th birthday celebrations by dying dramatically in his attic study. In the deliciously entertaining Knives Out, Johnson goes back to his roots with an updated homage to the Agatha Christie whodunnits he loved as a child, and to those “cheekily self-aware” screen adaptations in which Peter Ustinov would lead an all-star cast through a labyrinthine murder mystery. ![]() More recently, his 2017 Star Wars movie, The Last Jedi, outraged some hardcore fans who didn’t think the series’ ever-evolving mythology should be up for discussion. In 2012’s Looper, he turned a time-travel adventure into a bleak meditation upon the consequences of solving problems through violence. That’s been a feature of Johnson’s career since his low-budget debut feature, Brick (2005), transposed a dark, 1940s noir narrative to the sunny environs of a modern California high school, with attention-grabbing results. D escribing his thrillingly playful attitude toward genre cinema, writer/director Rian Johnson once told me that he loved the “slightly meta conversation it opens between you and the viewer” – the way that a shared set of ground rules can be assumed and then subverted.
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