I had the pleasure of watching writer/director Rian Johnson’s first Knives Out mystery, appropriately entitled Knives Out, when it came out in late 2019. (This movie has nothing to do with knives per se, but the marketers perhaps wisely avoided the subtitle “A Benoit Blanc Mystery”). I wrote a review about it, which having read again, I believe holds up.
I can build upon and elaborate on the effectiveness of murder mystery tropes here. There is a moment in the original Knives Out which proves its status as a top-notch murder mystery. Like a lot of the stories in the locked room mystery genre, at the climax the Detective gathers all the suspects in the same room, reveals the killer, and explains how he figured it out. In Knives Out, I posit that one could pause the movie at that moment, rewatch the first 3/4’s of it again, think really hard about it, and actually come to the same conclusion as the detective. For that reason, even though the explanation was complicated, it didn’t come out of nowhere, and an astute observer would be rewarded for paying close attention for the first hour and a half.
The problem with Glass Onion is that when Detective Benoit reveals the killer and propounds his theory, I believe no audience member could possibly predict the killer no matter how many times they watched the beginning (at least with the reasoning given by Benoit). Why? Because Rian Johnson breaks his own Knives Out rules as to point of view and narrative.
I won’t give much away by explaining what I mean. In “Knives Out” the main characters are the maid (Ana De Armas) and Benoit. Their point of view are stand-ins for the audience. At no point, do those characters know or witness something that the audience also does not witness. There are no scenes left out that these characters are not sharing with us. This is not the case in “Glass Onion”. In both movies, we are introduced to Benoit Blanc showing up at an event not knowing who invited him. In “Knives Out”, Benoit didn’t know who had hired him and had no agenda. In “Glass Onion”, Benoit knew who had hired him and had an agenda the entire time. The movie keeps this detail from the audience until the climatic reveal.
The ultimate effect is a sense of deflation when one realizes that they have been tricked by a movie that was not as clever as it seemed. Now this, in and of itself, seems to be a theme here. A Glass Onion is apparently a metaphor for things that appear complicated, but are in fact, pretty stupid. Here, the murder and murderer is staring everyone plain in the face. This is true. The suspects involved, a politician (Kathryn Hahn), a scientist (Leslie Odum Jr.), a fashion influencer (Kate Hudson), a Twitch Star (Dave Bautista) have been summoned to the island of the Tech CEO/Genius Miles Bron (a la Elon Musk?) played by Edward Norton. On the surface, they appear to be successful and interesting people, but it turns out they are vapid and rather silly.
Then there is our hero. In Knives Out, this was the maid who physically could not tell a lie without throwing up. Here, it is Andi Brand (played by Janelle Monae) whose back story is that she was the real brains behind the tech genius’s success and got screwed out of the company in a recent court case. Dare I say it, the maid’s character even with her rare physical disorder made more sense. The problem here is that the explanation for why Andi Brand is the real genius is kind of dumb. We are told that the court case all hinges on an algorithm that she wrote on a cocktail napkin in a bar several years ago. The movie would have us believe that the information on this cocktail napkin is all it took to create a stupidly successful billion dollar tech business and that she could be frozen out of this business if she couldn’t prove that she wrote what was on that napkin. The actual tech on the napkin, (or for that matter what Alpha, the tech business, actually does) is never explained (because how could it be without sounding ridiculous), but given what I know about court cases, and the little I know about intellectual property, it all sounds pretty stupid. A more effective reason for trusting Andi Brand over Miles Bron, and maybe what the movie was relying on, is the modern audience’s inclination for believing that a white man has taken all the credit for a black woman’s work.
As Benoit explains with annoyed incredulity at the end, the murder and the murderer were really stupid and it was merely the inclination that we have as audience members to expect a more complicated mystery. Sure, I guess, but couldn’t this all just be a convenient excuse for writing a lazy and stupid murder mystery. After all, if the characters and the mystery are stupid, well, ahem, isn’t that because Rian Johnson wrote them that way?
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