Knives Out (2019)

REVIEW BY: ROBERT CHANDLER

Rian Johnson’s KNIVES OUT is a splendid return-to-form after the career mis-step of taking on STAR WARS: THE LAST JEDI. Don’t let that film put you off. KNIVES is Johnson showing you what he does best. Go back to his debut, the high school noir BRICK, then journey through his con-men tale, THE BROTHERS BLOOM and his time-travel twistknot, LOOPER, to alight on this, a brilliant piece of crime fiction that shows the writer-director cold enough to construct a precision-tooled, tightly-fitting jigsaw puzzle, but warm enough to imbue his characters (even though they push toward the level of caricature necessary for the genre) with heart. 

Because the characters have heart, so, too, does the film.

No wonder he got that cast. KNIVES gives each of them everything they could possibly want from a role, an ensemble piece that is skilful enough to establish quickly who is who and who might want what from whom, and then sets them against each other.

Look: Daniel Craig, Michael Shannon, Toni Colette, Jamie Lee Curtis, Don Johnson, LaKeith Stanfield, Jaeden Martell, Christopher Plummer, Chris Evans. The director even finds room for M Emmet Walsh and Frank Oz.

And then there is Ana de Armas. De Armas was once pitched to me in Hollywood by an agent who described her as “a newcomer who is smoking hot. Like, smoke city hot.” Well, yes. And so she did KNOCK KNOCK as a murderous beautiful teen who arrives at Keannu Reeves’ house to seduce him and BLADE RUNNER2049 as the sexbot hologram girlfriend of Ryan Gosling. Here, in KNIVES OUT, she plays a professional nurse and companion to the elderly author, Christopher Plummer. The story falls on her shoulders and she is ably up to the task, lifting the film and, through her performance, set against that cast, she wins the day (this is not a spoiler).

KNIVES OUT is a loving tribute to the grand traditions of crime fiction: a whodunnit in a big country house, a last will being read, a clutch of relatives and descendants who want more than they are being given. It takes those ingredients and turns them into something remarkable.

Go see it.