8 / 10
Official trailer
Knives Out is Rian Johnson’s 2019 American murder mystery comedy.
The film depicts the investigation following the death of wealthy mystery novelist Harlan Thrombey. Private detective Benoit Blanc arrives at the Thrombey estate to interview the family, including Harlan’s young Latina nurse Marta Cabrera who knows more than she initially reveals. Daniel Craig plays Blanc. Ana de Armas plays Marta. Christopher Plummer plays Harlan. Chris Evans plays grandson Ransom Drysdale. Jamie Lee Curtis plays daughter Linda. Don Johnson plays Linda’s husband Richard. Michael Shannon plays son Walt.
Toni Collette plays daughter-in-law Joni. Lakeith Stanfield plays detective Elliott. Johnson wrote the screenplay. MRC and Lionsgate produced the film on a budget of approximately 40 million dollars, and it grossed approximately 312 million dollars worldwide. The work received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay.
For me, Knives Out is pure fun, a whodunit that plays like a party where everybody’s lying and the host is dead.
I grin through most of it. Craig is having a ball, de Armas gives the thing a heart, and Johnson’s twist on the structure is clever enough to keep me off balance. My reservation is the family: with a cast this stacked, a few of the Thrombeys barely get a scene worthy of the actor playing them.
The film revived the country-house murder mystery for contemporary audiences and launched a franchise that’s continued through Glass Onion (2022) and Wake Up Dead Man (2025).
Johnson combined Agatha Christie plot mechanics with current American political content about class, immigration, and inheritance. The Craig performance as Benoit Blanc gives the actor a comic tone his Bond work didn’t allow. The film proved that mid-budget original screenplay productions could still achieve major commercial success in a market dominated by franchise material.
The result is the picture that showed the murder mystery genre’s continuing commercial viability in original instead of adapted form.
The Mystery Structure
Johnson reveals the apparent solution at the midpoint instead of the end. Marta accidentally administers a fatal medication overdose to Harlan and spends the first half of the film concealing the accident. The audience knows the truth before the family does.
The conventional mystery delays the reveal until the conclusion. Knives Out flips the structure and asks what happens when the audience already knows the answer.
It transforms the film from a whodunit into a will-she-get-caught suspense story. The mystery exists at the level of why Harlan was killed instead of who killed him. The structural choice solved the modern mystery’s central problem. Sophisticated audiences have absorbed enough Christie material that conventional whodunit reveals rarely surprise them. Moving the reveal to the middle gives the second half emotional content that pure plot resolution can’t generate.
The midpoint reveal is the move I admire most. Giving away the answer halfway sounds like a terrible idea for a mystery, and instead it makes me lean in harder, watching Marta try to hold it together while Blanc circles closer.
For Writers
Genre conventions can be moved or inverted to produce stronger work than strict adherence allows. Similar logic applies to fiction. The structural assumption you make about your genre may be the place where reinvention should happen.
Benoit Blanc
Craig plays Blanc with a Foghorn Leghorn Southern accent that other actors would have found impossible to sustain. The performance combines Hercule Poirot mannerisms with American Southern courtroom drama elements. Blanc speaks in elaborate metaphors and theatrical declamations that conventional detective characters avoid. The character is comic without being unserious about his investigation. I’d listen to Craig’s Blanc read a phone book. The accent should be ridiculous, it absolutely is, and that’s half the pleasure of every scene he’s in.
The success of the character launched the franchise. Glass Onion and Wake Up Dead Man both place Blanc at the center of new mysteries with new ensembles.
The structural choice to make Blanc the consistent figure across films, instead of tying the franchise to specific locations or families, gives the picture flexibility that location-based or family-based mystery series typically lack. The franchise can continue as long as Craig remains willing to play the role.
For Writers
Consistent character can sustain a franchise more reliably than consistent setting. The same applies to series fiction. The protagonist who travels is the brand. The location that stays needs the protagonist to come visit.
The Class Politics
The Thrombey family treats Marta as a beloved family member while never remembering which Latin American country she’s from. Different family members give her four different national origins across the film. The picture establishes their actual relationship to her without requiring direct accusation. They like her in the way wealthy people like the help they consider unusually capable. The political content is unmistakable.
The running joke about Marta’s home country is my favorite piece of writing in the film. Nobody stops to lecture anybody. The family just keeps getting it wrong, and every wrong answer says more than a speech would.
Johnson made the political content explicit instead of subtextual. The film’s resolution depends on the Thrombey will leaving everything to Marta instead of the family. The family then attempts to use immigration enforcement against Marta’s mother to force her to refuse the inheritance. The film treats American wealth, American immigration policy, and American family inheritance as connected systems serving the same purpose. The argument isn’t subtle. The film isn’t trying to be.
For Writers
Direct political content can succeed when the genre frame supports it. The same applies to fiction. Wrapping the argument in conventional genre pleasures lets readers receive it without feeling lectured.
Craft Note
Johnson wrote the screenplay during the year following The Last Jedi (2017). The Star Wars production had been controversial. Johnson wanted to write something for himself that combined genres he loved. The result was a script he produced independently instead of through a major studio. The success of this film showed that original mid-budget work could still find wide audiences. The franchise that followed has continued to work at mid-budget scale instead of expanding into blockbuster territory.
Is Knives Out worth watching?
The country-house murder mystery found a new audience with Knives Out, which launched a franchise that has kept the fun going.
The midpoint reveal remade the structure, Benoit Blanc is a detective I’d follow anywhere, and the class politics land with real bite. It sits at an 8 because the big family ensemble is thinner than that cast deserves. Watch it if you like mysteries, Craig away from Bond, or original films that beat the franchise machine.
