Knives Out has been talked about as an exploration and subversion of the murder mystery genre, which I mean kind of, but that’s misleading from what the movie really is about: thanskgiving 2016 dinner table politics. The movie’s central murder happened on the night of November 8th. Trump is deliberately never mentioned by name but there’s a scene where you walk in on the middle of a conversation that’s clearly about him. More than Trump himself the movie is about Our Political Climate.
The central mystery of Knives Out is the Thrombey family patriarch, their father/grandfather Harlan, who ran a murder mystery publishing line, dies by mysterious suicide the night of his 85th birthday party, which has all of the family together in his house. On the night of this party, he decides to cut every member of his family off from his support, which makes all of them potential suspects. But that murder mystery is mostly a vehicle to introduce you to the various characters that make up Johnson’s vision of the American politics. His youngest son, Walt, has soft conservative views that are rarely spoken, but his teenage son is a skinny and pale “alt-right troll” that is constantly on his phone. His daughter-in-law Joni is a middle-aged influencer: she runs a skincare company named Flam that’s “also a lifestyle”. Her daughter is a liberal arts college student studying some unknown SJW subject: one of the family members describes it as “crypto-Marxist postdeconstructual feminist poetry theory”. Then there’s Harlan’s oldest son, Richard, his wife Linda, and their son Ransom, the American center. Richard is the right side of the center: in the aforementioned scene about Trump, Richard says “I don’t like him, he’s an asshole, but maybe an asshole is what we need”. At the start of the movie he quotes the Hamilton lyric “immigrants, we get the job done” to talk about their housekeeper but later rails on illegal immigrants. Linda’s the left: she calls a New Yorker profile of the movie’s detective “delightful”. She doesn’t ever articulate her opinions or stand up to her husband though, letting him harass their immigrant housekeeper about how she immigrated to the country “the right way” when actually her mom is an undocumented immigrant and he doesn’t know that.
The immigrant housekeeper, Marta, is the foil to the family. She has a cracked phone, she literally pukes if she lies. She’s not politically engaged but just kind. She’s the person who really took care of their grandfather Harlan and so he leaves everything in his will to her. There’s two different running jokes in the movie about the family’s surface level kindness to her overshadowed by their own selfishness. They all affectionately describe her as a hardworking immigrant but each say her family is from a different country, and three of them say she should have been at Harlan’s funeral but they were “outvoted” by the others. They all go a bit crazy towards her once they find out that everything has been left to her: the SJW college student Meg reveals to the rest of the Thrombeys that Marta’s mom was an undocumented immigrant and cries about losing her tuition when she really just wants money, the twitter Nazi teen calls her an “anchor baby”, Walt tries to intimidate her with threats of being deported due to the family’s legal resources, and they all repeatedly imply that she has to give up the inheritance because it’s not fair to them. The family is greedy and unempathetic to her struggles. We never find out exactly how Marta spends the money, but the movie ends implying that she’s so selfless she will try to help out the Thrombeys.
The murder mystery of the film is answered about 30 minutes in: Harlan killed himself because Marta mixed up his morphine and pain medication, giving him a morphine overdose: in the few minutes before he dies of a morphine overdose Harlan concocts a mystery plot that will allow Marta to not get convicted by the “slayer rule” (in the world of Knives Out if you kill someone even accidentally you don’t get your inheritance from them). He commits suicide, has Marta leave the house, sneak back in, go downstairs in his clothes to create a false trail, and then leave for real. None of this is solved by Daniel Craig’s southern accent detective, Benoit Blanc: he kind of bumbles along throughout the movie until the very end when he solves the case all at once. The twist at the end, that Blanc reveals, is that Marta didn’t really mix up the medications: Harlan’s grandson Hugh Ransom switched them, after he found out that Marta was the sole inheritor of his will: he tries to get her convicted by the “slayer rule”. Marta was just such a good nurse that she gave Harlan the right medication despite the labels being wrong, because she knew how the medications felt pouring out of the bottle, and then when she actually read the labels she was misled. Had Harlan called an ambulance as she suggested he would still be alive. When this is revealed, Ransom impulsively tries to kill Marta as revenge by grabbing a knife from the wall and stabbing her, but it turns out to be one of Harlan’s prop knives, so Marta lives.
In the final scene, where the twist is revealed, Ransom stands for the whole family’s greed: he was the one to go after Marta not because of his particular selfishness but because he was the only one who knew Marta would inherit everything before the movie ended. He asks Marta how she could take their “ancestral family home” and Rian Johnson delights in his followup line delivered in Daniel Craig’s fake southern accent: “Harlan bought this house in the eighties. From a Pakistani real estate baron.” The legacy that the characters were selfishly obsessed with isn’t real, they’re just clinging to the accomplishments of their father. The immigrant sold him the house. The last scene of the movie is Marta standing on the balcony of the house she now owns, looking down at the family as they leave. She’s drinking a cup of coffee in a way that evokes Cersei standing on the balcony drinking wine in Game of Thrones. She’s in control now, she won.
Just like the last Rian Johnson film, The Last Jedi, I’m left with slightly conflicted emotions: Johnson clearly sacrifices plot coherency in service of theme but his themes are always interesting and the social satire in this movie is fun. Unlike The Last Jedi this movie doesn’t have thousands of people screaming online about how it ruined Luke Skywalker so I don’t feel as ethically obligated to defend it. If those people saw this movie I’m sure they’d say Rian Johnson is an SJW again but I think this movie clearly tries to take shots at all sides of dinner table politics. My heart tells me that Knives Out is just a bit corny and heavy-handed, focusing so much on immigration tackling the reality of it. Hamilton’s “immigrants, we get the job done” tone that it mocks isn’t really that far from what the movie itself says. But at the same time, no one who I saw the movie with read it the same way as me and everyone online keeps talking about it as a murder mystery (I know my way is right though) so maybe the heavy-handedness is what we need. And I like Hamilton. The Last Jedi was pretty heavy-handed too and people misread that one even more. I can definitely tell that Rian Johnson is trying really hard to make interesting and accessible movies that challenge their audiences. Maybe there is no need to think about it more than that.
