KNIVES OUT - In Deep

There's something delightfully pure about a good old-fashioned locked room mystery. Take a lot of people, a little murder and a signature location, then watch them bounce off of each other as one person tries to solve the crime and another tries to get away with it. Merely executing that concept masterfully is admirable, but what makes the new "Whodunnit" from writer/director Rian Johnson (Looper, Star Wars: The Last Jedi) a genuinely great film is how it chooses find its best narrative footholds beyond what we expect.

As all great mysteries must.

The premise of Knives Out is pretty much what's on the poster - Harlan Thrombey, the wealthy pater familias of an eccentric family, is found dead, and during the week of the all-important Reading of the Will (yeah, they're that kind of family), a series of follow-up questions by the local authorities and the presence of private detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig, in rare form) hired by parties unknown throw what seemed to be a suicide into complete disarray. The children and grandchildren (Jamie Lee Curtis, Michael Shannon, and Toni Colette, and Chris Evans, among others) all have more-than-ample motive and suspiciously airtight alibis that combine with volatile personalities and long-gestating personal drama to put on a hell of a show. The genius in Johnson's approach is that the audience gets the perfect surrogate to revel in this lying skulduggery while also maintaining a dramatic stake in the proceedings.

While the marketing has been leaning into the presence of Daniel Craig apparently trying to one-up his own southern-fried accent from Logan Lucky, Knives Out actually centers on Ana De Armas as Marta, the nurse that Harlan Thrombey has hired on to help him with routines, medication, and to be someone to talk to who's not a member of his family. While her character is initially played as a pointed contrast to Harlan's privileged whitebread relatives, her connection to the deceased and her gradually-revealed resourcefulness turn the film into something of a double shell game where she's having to be every bit as careful navigating the investigation as Blanc is in pursuing it.

Johnson seems unable to make a straight genre film, with his other forays examining the pillars of their own construction so directly that he managed to piss off Star Wars fans of all people by *checks notes* making a somewhat downbeat sequel that puts its characters through the wringer and offers no clear path to victory (cough). This film allows him to do that while also unleashing some venom at the current political climate. For example, the fact that Marta is a second-generation immigrant is at first something the Thrombeys praise because she's "one of the good ones," but as their lies are peeled away it becomes clear that they'll "other" her in order to cast her out even more quickly than to pride themselves in recognizing a "good example." Knives Out doesn't just play in the Old Dark House Mystery space, it digs its claws into the distasteful roots of major elements of the game (there's a reason "well-off white people in fancy clothes and lavish accommodations" is the defining image of the genre), it picks at the scab covering something foul until it can be laid bare and cleansed.

Which still wouldn't matter without some filmmaking elbow grease, but - again - this is the guy who made Looper and The Last Jedi. Not only is Knives Out a crackerjack piece of visual storytelling front to back with clever devices to see characters' previous actions as they lie during interviews or convey a reeling mind by switching from a locked-down camera to a handheld in the same shot, but it's also very, very, VERY funny. Pound for pound, this is the most fun I've had at the movie theater this year. It's hard to believe a film so intentionally "stage-bound" could also feel so vibrant and alive, but both the director and the cast are clearly both having the time of their lives while also channeling their talents into a laser-focused package of unexpected twists, laughs, some occasionally biting satire, but still brimming with palpable human warmth.

Whether you're only looking to admire the sheen on the surface or to dig in a little, Knives Out is a deeply rewarding "Whodunnit" that'll have you hoping that the people whodunnit will do it all over again - and soon.