Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022) Review
7/10
A group of old friends are invited to a billionaire’s Greek island for a murder mystery weekend, and somebody dies for real. That’s the premise and the film is entirely open about how conventional it is. The title announces the actual subject. Something that looks layered and turns out to be transparent all the way through, and that’s also the film’s assessment of its villain.
I had a great time with this one, and I also had Miles Bron figured out long before the film wanted me to.
Those two facts sit side by side the whole way through. Johnson is funnier and angrier here than in Knives Out, and I’ll take a comedy about a rich idiot nobody corrects over most mysteries. I just wish the puzzle had put up more of a fight.
Rian Johnson wrote and directed it during the pandemic, on location in Greece with a bubble production, and Netflix paid a reported four hundred and sixty-nine million dollars for two sequels to Knives Out before this one existed.
The 7 is for a very entertaining film that’s weaker as a mystery than its predecessor and stronger as satire. The midpoint restructure is well executed, the ensemble is good, and the central answer is guessable within twenty minutes. It has more to say than the first film and a lot less to solve.
The Solution Is That He Is an Idiot
The film spends its first hour establishing Miles Bron as a visionary, and then reveals that every idea attributed to him was somebody else’s and that he’s no capability at all beyond acquiring people and taking credit.
The clue is in his speech and it’s planted from his first line. He misuses words constantly, reaching for something impressive and landing next to it. He says inbreathiate. He talks about breaking things and calls it a disruption when he means a mistake. He uses a Latin phrase incorrectly. Nobody corrects him, ever. That’s the second half of the joke. Everybody in the room is financially dependent on him and has decided not to notice. That’s the mystery’s real answer and it’s also the entire satire. The emperor is exactly as thin as he appears, and the trick was persuading intelligent people to assume depth.
The Mona Lisa is the clearest statement of it. He’s borrowed it, hung it in his house, and has the glass case on a fail-safe that he shows without understanding what he’s showing. Norton plays him without any menace at all. That’s correct. Bron is dangerous because he’s rich and nobody will tell him anything.
Norton is my favorite thing in the film. He plays Bron with the confidence of a man who has never once been told no, and the misused words land because he says them so proudly. Inbreathiate got a bigger laugh out of me than anything in Knives Out.
A villain whose secret is incompetence is harder to write than one whose secret is malice, because you must plant the incompetence in plain view while every other character treats him as formidable. Each misused word in this film is a clue and a joke at once. That’s the most efficient construction available.
The requirement is that nobody corrects him. The moment one character says the word wrong, the reader learns that this is a thing people notice, and the fraud becomes a running gag instead of a structural fact. Silence from everybody is what tells the reader the deception is collective instead of individual.
The test is to write your fraud’s dialogue and then ask, line by line, whether a competent person in the room would let it pass. If they wouldn’t, you need a reason they’re letting it pass, and that reason is usually money. Establish the dependency first and the incompetence can be as visible as you like.
The Island Is a Closed Circle With a Twist
Structurally it’s Christie. A fixed guest list, no way off, everybody with a motive, and a detective who happens to be present.
Bron has bought an island so that nobody can leave without his permission. That’s a modern version of the country house and considerably more sinister as a piece of property.
The variation is that the setting is also the villain’s self-portrait. The glass building with no privacy, the ridiculous art collection, the hourly chime, the borrowed Mona Lisa, the fruit that’s really a different fruit. All of it is a man displaying what he believes taste looks like.
So the geography does double duty, supplying the puzzle mechanics and the character assessment at the same time, and the film never has to say that Bron has no judgment because the house has said it. The Glass Onion itself, the dome at the top, is where the confrontation happens and where the metaphor becomes a location. Transparent, expensive, structurally weak, and full of the things he’s taken from other people.
Burning it down at the end is the film’s one moment of real catharsis and it works because the building has been the argument for two hours.
The Midpoint Rewind
The film stops halfway, returns to the beginning, and replays the same events with the information the audience was missing: the woman we’ve been watching isn’t who we thought and has come to destroy him.
It’s a well-worn device and it works here because the second pass is funnier than the first. Scenes that read one way become jokes once you know who was in the room and what she was doing.
The best of these is the arrival. On the first pass she’s awkward and out of place. On the second you see her working, testing responses, and deliberately provoking.
The cost is that the second half has less tension, because the audience now knows more than most of the characters. The film trades suspense for pleasure and mostly wins the trade. Janelle Monae holds the film together, and the performance is two distinct people. That’s the hardest assignment in the film and the least discussed, and she’s the reason the second half works for me. The arrival scene I’d shrugged at on the first pass turns into the funniest stretch of the movie once I can see her working the room.
The device also solves a problem. A mystery where the detective knows everything from the start has no engine, and the rewind lets Johnson have both an ignorant first act and a fully informed second one.
A structural rewind buys you two readings of the same material, and the reason to use it is that the second reading must be better than the first. If your reread only adds facts, you’ve written an explanation and the reader will feel the running time.
The construction step is to write the first pass so that every scene works as comedy or tension in its own right, and then check that the same scene acquires a second joke or a second meaning under the new information. The arrival sequence in this film is awkward on the first pass and tactical on the second, and both are entertaining.
The test is to list your pre-rewind scenes and describe what each one gains. If the answer for any of them is only that the reader now understands it, cut it or rebuild it, because a scene whose sole second-pass function is clarification was under-built the first time.
Why It Is Weaker Than Knives Out
The first film has a clever construction. You’re told what happened in the first twenty minutes, you believe you’re watching a cover-up instead of a mystery, and the actual solution reframes a scene you watched without suspicion.
This one has a satire with a mystery attached. The answer to who killed Duke is mechanically simple and the answer to who Bron is arrives early, so the film is running on the pleasure of watching a fraud be dismantled instead of on deduction.
That’s a legitimate choice and it produces a less rewatchable film, because satire lands once and construction lands repeatedly.
The ensemble is also thinner. Knives Out has the Thrombeys, who are individually specific and collectively a family. The Disruptors are types: the politician, the influencer, the men’s rights streamer, the scientist. Each gets one characteristic. The thin ensemble loses me a little. I couldn’t tell you much about the Disruptors beyond their job titles, and a murder mystery lives on suspects I care about. Knives Out had me suspecting everybody. This one had me waiting for Blanc to say what I’d already worked out. Blanc is used better here, though. In the first film he’s a device with an accent. Here he’s given boredom, a marriage, a bath, and a real reason to be there, and Craig is visibly enjoying himself more.
The pandemic setting has already dated in an odd way, and the film’s willingness to be specific about 2020 will either read as a time capsule or as a mistake depending on when you watch it.
What Netflix Bought
The deal is part of the film’s context and worth stating plainly. Netflix paid a reported four hundred and sixty-nine million dollars for two Knives Out sequels before either existed. That’s one of the largest sums ever committed to unmade films.
That money bought Johnson total independence and it shows in both directions. The film has a cast of this size, a Greek island, and a borrowed-looking Mona Lisa, and it also has nobody telling him the central answer arrives too early.
It got a one-week theatrical run in around six hundred cinemas and sold out, and Netflix pulled it to go to streaming, a move Netflix has been criticized for and one that was clearly deliberate. The film performed extremely well on the platform.
What the arrangement means for the work is that these are now the most expensive films of their type ever made, and the type is a mid-budget star-ensemble murder mystery, which the industry had abandoned entirely.
I’m glad somebody is spending real money on star-packed murder mysteries again, because I missed them. I’d still have liked one person on the payroll with the nerve to tell Johnson to tighten it and hide his answer better.
So a streaming service has revived the cycle that produced Death on the Nile in 1978, at four times the scale, and the results are recognizably the same product with a satirical layer added.
Whether that survives a third and fourth entry is the interesting question, and the history of the form suggests the answer is no.
Total creative freedom isn’t obviously good for a piece of work, and this film is a useful demonstration. Johnson had no oversight and produced something looser and less rigorous than the film he made under normal constraints.
The reason is that constraint forces prioritization. A budget limit, a page count, an editor asking why a scene exists: each of these is an external pressure toward the version with nothing spare in it. Remove them and you get every idea you had. That isn’t the same as your best ideas.
The practical response, if you’re working without editorial pressure, is to manufacture some.
Set a word count you won’t exceed. Give the draft to somebody instructed to ask what each chapter is for. The discipline that used to arrive from outside has to come from somewhere, and assuming you can supply it yourself is how baggy books happen.
Should you watch Glass Onion?
Yes, and watch Knives Out first if you haven’t, because the comparison is most of the interest. Expect to guess the central answer early and to enjoy the film anyway. It’s funnier than its predecessor and a lot less clever, and watching Bron get taken apart gets it most of the way there. It stops at a 7 for me because satire works once, and I want a mystery with enough construction to reward going back.
