Knives Out is a warm-hearted send-up of the cosy mystery genre: the Agatha Christie-type stories where an eccentric detective plucks a murderer from a tight-knit family/social unit of seven to ten people. In this case, the eccentric detective is Benoit Blanc, a man of idiosyncratic methods played by Daniel Craig in a deeply improbable Southern US accent. He’s been engaged by the police to investigate the murder of Harlan Thrombey, a famous writer who’s amassed a vast fortune through churning out bloody mystery novels. The suspects are his family, who are all in various ways hankering after or reliant on his money, the housekeeper Fran and his Brazilian nurse Marta, whose mother is an undocumented immigrant.
Director Rian Johnson steers us through a host of twists and turns as Benoit Blanc (who we always suspect is slightly incompetent) seeks his culprit, asking seemingly inane questions and plinking piano keys as the regular police interview the suspects. This is a film both full of surprises and utterly familiar, plot-wise: a place where we can safely expect the unexpected.
The politics of Knives Out, however, upend this comfortable conformity. The Thrombeys fall into two political camps: comfortably-racist-bordering-on-white-supremacist (complete with a radicalised teenage boy who spends his time viewing alt-right websites on his smartphone) and blinkered white liberals who can’t see their own racism. Both use Marta as a talking point in their immigration debates, a comment on their shared inability to see people of colour as fully human, and, when things get nasty, both camps are willing to threaten and/or manipulate her in order to get what they want. But the film – and Benoit Blanc – is firmly on her side throughout: on the side of kindness, decency, professionalism, humanity. And the end of the film sees not a comfortable return to the status quo – which is how many of these stories end; violence and discontent contained by the solving of the mystery so life can go on as normal – but an upheaval of the social order. Marta inherits the Thrombey house, and Harlan’s grasping family leave empty-handed, Marta looking on silently from an upper balcony. Not a return to the status quo, but perhaps a hopeful instatement of a new status quo, where the good inherit the earth.
In other words: watch Knives Out! It’s a beautifully-made film, colourful in character and incident, a universe to fall into and a site of hope; cosy and progressive at the same time.
The English Student 