Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Knives Out’ on Amazon Prime, Rian Johnson’s Wildly Entertaining Murder Mystery-Slash-Political Allegory

Rejoice, for Knives Out is now free for Amazon Prime subscribers, allowing them to watch it 100 times if they want — and they may end up wanting to. Director Rian Johnson’s follow-up to Star Wars: The Last Jedi may have been screwed out of many Oscar nominations (it earned a screenplay nod), but achieved many other things: It made us enthusiastic about a murder-mystery. It established Ana de Armas as a star. It was commercially successful and critically acclaimed. And it’s the kind of movie that’s even better the second time around.

KNIVES OUT: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Marta Cabrera (Ana de Armas) has a tricky gag reflex: every time she lies, she throws up. Her virtue is biologically ingrained. It therefore makes sense that she’d take on an earnest and honorable profession like nursing. She cares for Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer), an 85-year-old murder-mystery novelist of great renown and wealth, and as her kind heart leads, so follows an emotionally affectionate, grandfatherly relationship. They play the board game Go every night before she administers his medications. It’s a beautiful, respectful friendship.

But as it goes, when Knives Out begins, Harlan Thrombey is dead. Suicide. Knife to the carotid. Marta was the last to see him alive. Police detectives Elliott (LaKeith Stanfield) and Wagner (Noah Segan) are in Thrombey’s mansion. The plot that follows is not thin. It’s thick as hell. Troublesome. Vexing too. Quite vexing. But let’s not get into that too much.

Rather, this being a murder mystery in the classical style, let’s examine the variety of suspicious character types called in for questioning. They’re almost all family; they had gathered in the hours prior to Harlan’s expiration. Linda Drysdale (Jamie Lee Curtis) is Harlan’s oldest offspring, and Richard (Don Johnson) is her husband; they’re arrogant blowhards, parents to Ransom (Chris Evans), a smirking fast-life jackass trust-funder. Joni Thrombey (Toni Collette) is the widowed daughter-in-law, a new-agey influencer dependent on Harlan’s biannual checks for his granddaughter Meg’s (Katherine Langford) private-school tuition. Walt Thrombey (Michael Shannon) is the youngest child, “publisher” of Harlan’s works; he’s married to Donna (Riki Lindhome), and their teenage son Jacob (Jaeden Martell) is an internet troll.

You’ll raise a shadow of an eyebrow of a doubt upon all of them, save for Grandnana (K Callan), Harlan’s nearly mute, post-elderly mother, who sits quietly observing and nearly immobile, her true age a mystery for history. Meanwhile, Marta looks nervous and upset, as a true heart would be, given the circumstances.

The cops dig into these folks only out of due diligence, convinced by the physical evidence that the suicide is open-and-shut. Except one man sits in the background of the interrogations, punctuating suspects’ declarations with the single PLINK of a piano key. That man is Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), a famous private investigator with a SUH-THUHHN accent whose reputation precedes him so remarkably, Joni once read a tweet about a New Yorker profile about him. Will anything get past him?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Clue, Gosford Park, Murder by Death, all the Murder on the Orient Expresses and The Last of Sheila, which I read about in a Rian Johnson tweet (and then actually watched; it’s a gem). Also its Oscar competitor, Parasite — more on that in a minute.

Performance Worth Watching: De Armas is a revelation as a pillar of honesty and selflessness among a bastion of entitled narcissists. Marta is kind in the face of great avarice, and de Armas doesn’t just court our empathy, she makes us feel hopeful.

Memorable Dialogue: Blanc’s description of a will reading: “Think of a community theater production of a tax return.” Of course, the line is spoken with ironic foreshadowing.

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: First things first: Blanc’s doughnut speech is one for the ages. It’s so funny, it makes me giddy. I’m almost upset Johnson’s script lost the Oscar to Parasite. Almost.

As Parasite functioned as a caustic criticism of social and economic division, Knives Out is a scorching depiction of systemic inequality in America. Marta is the daughter of an illegal immigrant, and a running joke is derived from the Thrombeys’ inability to remember her country of origin. They’re condescending and nasty, not always blatantly, but subtextually. When she’s unwillingly positioned as a roadblock to their inheritance, they attempt to leverage her with the cruelest threats. The Don Johnson character spews ugly rightist rhetoric, and the Toni Collette character is a leftist hypocrite; they argue in hyperbole, although the script never invokes the Trump-word. Harlan’s children are the products of privilege. They’re white. Marta is Latina. This setup is, in a word, rich. And sneakily subversive. Go ahead, tell me Knives Out wasn’t relevant when it debuted in late 2019 — and isn’t even more relevant now.

Johnson adheres to Marta’s point-of-view not just to align us with her worldview, but to use her as a narrative conduit for a series of ingenious plot twists and revelations. You’ll find Knives Out is full of surprises, and begs repeat viewing not just because it’s witty and provocative, its principals perfectly cast, its tone razor-sharp, its visuals sumptuous; our perspective evolves the second time around. There are things that Marta knows, and things we don’t know she knows, but when we watch again, we know she knows them, and knowing she knows them adds fresh color to the story. And its scorching subtext only gets crisper and more concise.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Knives Out is vital in its message, and wildly entertaining.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream Knives Out on Amazon Prime