Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022, Dir. Rian Johnson):
The whole movie, for me, is a bit of a primal scream against the carnival-like idiocy of the past six years … I think it’s absolutely an angrier movie, for me at least. I hope the experience of watching it doesn’t feel like an angry, hateful thing. But it’s definitely coming from a place of just wanting to scream about a lot of things.
Rian Johnson
Rian Johnson’s movies are those of a prankster with a point. Sometimes both prank and point are well-taken: Brick (2005) transplanted a ’40s-style detective thriller, anachronistic dialogue and all, into the unlikely setting of a modern California high school, teen angst conjoined with hard-boiled noir, each finding unusual resonance in the other. Looper (2012) was a clash of high concepts (time-travel hijinks, a comic-booky villain origin story) that intentionally sabotaged itself at the climax, negating the need for comic-book heroes and baddies altogether. And then you have more problematic fare like Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi, a sour entry in a franchise about heroes that undercut built-in notions about heroism at every turn, alienating a large chunk of the audience.
After the reception to The Last Jedi curtailed Johnson’s further involvement with Star Wars, one wouldn’t blame him for falling back on the knotty indie movies which made his name. Instead, he created a crowd-pleaser in Knives Out, an all-star whodunit which paid homage to Agatha Christie while also acknowledging our contentious times: entitled trust fund babies, daffy liberals and self-righteous right-wingers at war with each other, with Ana de Armas playing the sympathetic commoner caught in between, topped off by Daniel Craig as country-fried gentleman detective Benoit Blanc, laying waste to his James Bond persona.
Satisfying as both a locked-room puzzle and a wry character study, Knives Out all but demanded a follow-up, and with Glass Onion we have the first of what promises to be several Blanc mysteries. Nothing if not canny, Johnson reverses field with Onion, giving us the opposite of what he served up in Knives Out. While Knives mimicked classic drawing-room Christie whodunits with its country mansion setting and autumnal atmosphere, Glass Onion is more heated in every sense, indulging in the summery vibes of exotic Greek isles while stretching its characters to more obnoxious, cartoony extremes. And if de Armas emerged as the beating heart underneath Knives Out‘s coolly plotted surface, peel back the layers beneath Onion‘s rowdy antics and one will find a hardened tale of revenge, best served cold.
The set-up is a mash-up of The Last of Sheila, Evil Under the Sun and A Murder Is Announced: tech billionaire Miles Bron (Edward Norton) has gathered his fellow “disruptors” at his Greek getaway for a week of fun and games, including a showstopper: a contest to solve his own murder. The first 15 minutes of the movie set the tone as we’re introduced to the guests, who puzzle over overcomplicated puzzle boxes that Miles has sent out as invitations. Johnson goes split-screen and shrill as the characters stir themselves into a goofy frenzy to open their individual boxes—and then he literally takes a hammer to all the vapidness on display, as the nonplussed Andi (Janelle Monáe), not having any of this shit, pulverizes her box within seconds to get at the invitation inside. So it goes for the rest of the movie, as every gesture towards grandiosity and cleverness is crushed.
The murder promised by Miles’s invitation does indeed arrive, but not necessarily to who you might think, and it takes over an hour to do so. Up to then, we’re stuck with these characters on that Greek isle as they snipe, strut and pontificate at each other. Johnson’s repartee takes inspiration from Anthony Shaffer plays such as Sleuth and Whodunnit, but he lacks Shaffer’s pin-sharp wit; all the bickering and bitchery feels more like a grind than it should. Then again, being stuck with these odious people might be the point behind the pranks. The movie was filmed during the height of the pandemic, and the weary cantankerousness of those times seeps into the story. Much is made of masking up (or completely ignoring to do so) and lip service is paid to the joy of gathering with friends during troubled times, even as it fast becomes clear that the gathering is just another form of self-isolation, no one wants to be there, and everyone has a reason to knock Miles off.
Most of the fun in the early going comes from guessing at the real-life inspirations for each character. Edward Norton’s Miles merges the self-entitlement of Elon Musk with the aspirational patter of Steve Jobs, Dave Bautista’s incel podcaster comes off like Joe Rogan on steroids, and Kate Hudson’s dunderheaded fashion influencer is a Kardashian gone to seed. Sadly, little comic juice is left for Leslie Odom as a put-upon scientist, Kathryn Hahn as the morally compromised governor of Connecticut, or Jessica Fenwick as Hudson’s harried PA. Not surprisingly, the only two characters who aren’t out-and-out caricatures are Blanc and Andi, both of whom hoard their own secrets. Modulating his performance between pop-eyed cornpone and steely watchfulness depending on the moment, Craig continues to have a ball as Blanc, even as Johnson drops tantalizing tidbits about the sleuth’s background, including a surprise cameo that hints at Blanc’s sexual orientation. It won’t be revealed here what lies beneath Monáe’s cool hauteur as Andi, but suffice to say that she gets to stretch her acting muscles. On the other end of the spectrum, Noah Segan is a walking punch line as a stoner guest who wanders in and out of the action, but he’s deployed for maximum punchiness.
Benoit Blanc: It’s a dangerous thing to mistake speaking without thought for speaking the truth.
Birdie (flattered): Are you calling me dangerous?
When murder finally occurs, Johnson falls back on the same narrative fillip he used in Knives Out, hitting us with a lengthy flashback that provides a new perspective on events even as it invites us to puzzle over the mystery until Blanc explains all. Johnson takes care to spread clues and hints like bread crumbs, and like Knives Out, there’s a pleasing geometrical precision to how the plot comes together, as Blanc outs the killer as the worst of all things: a simple-minded buffoon. (“It’s so dumb, it’s brilliant!” a guest gasps. “No!” retorts an outraged Blanc. “It’s just dumb!”) Too bad the game-changing flashback doesn’t bring the same charge to the proceedings as it did in Knives Out, and the actual solution to the murder won’t shock anyone who knows their Christie (hint: Don’t read the short story “Triangle at Rhodes” or the novel Peril at End House prior to watching the movie). To compensate, Johnson concludes with a big bang of a climax that leaves its participants shaken and stirred, and a grand estate—not to mention an entire business empire—in flames. Rosseau once said, “When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich”; in the case of Glass Onion, Johnson all but cackles at the idea of the rich eating themselves, with a little help from plebes like Blanc.
In the end, Glass Onion follows up on what John Lennon sang about in the Beatles song of the same name: “Looking through the bent-backed tulips / To see how the other half live.” It’s a film loose enough to throw in random cameos by the likes of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Angela Lansbury, yet bristly in its worldview, as it adopts a more acerbic, remote and mean-spirited tone than Knives Out. It’s also infused with a punky spirit, as Johnson caps the humiliation of his rich idiots with the truly wince-worthy sight of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa burned to a crisp. As a piece of entertainment, the movie is a decent time-waster; whether you truly respond to Johnson’s provocations depends on how well you appreciate his pranks, and whether you believe eating the rich is all that tasty. ■
