A very welcome return-to-form whodunit, Knives Out starts off on a typical suicide case of a renowned author which may or may not have been, as our main detectives uncover underlying tensions the man had with his family in their business. Now an investigator Daniel Craig with the heftiest southern accent an Englishman can seduce leads a trail down the family line suspects to open any loose ends, centring his judgements solely around a family birthday party the night before, which gets revisited through different characters’ recalled actions in that night throughout the film. Most interesting of them is the dead author’s young medical carer, with a most ingenious plotline of her inability to lie due to an instant vomiting reaction when she tries. This is played to maximum effect when she tries to cover up some questionable acts by swerving around dishonesty into dumb false-leads.
Knives Out’s main narrative is compactly tight as any detective trope should but retains a unique style by exploring vintage high-class lifestyles surrounding a respected manor in a present-day society, filled with top-notch performances from well-recognised faces and a screenplay by Rian Johnson, who proves constrained singular character-driven plots are his area of comfort compared to his bitterly lacklustre handling of a franchise with millennia of subplots oozing from every pore (Last Jedi). As someone who rarely sees Daniel Craig as more than an alpha male handgun-gripping Bond performer, seeing him purely dedicate himself to a role of a wide-eyed Southern detective was a delight, slipping many quirky remarks into his investigative exposition much to the bewilderment of the surrounding suspects as to the audience. ‘What is this KFC CSI?’ being a particularly memorable summary from the family’s snobbish slacker son, played on equally surprising new acting grounds by Chris Evans. Unlike Craig, the man’s career has been painted red, white and blue all-over by blockbuster superhero bonanza and to see him eagerly switch to more cultivated narrative roles is one of the best career shifts of recent actors, playing off psychologically-manipulative and uncaringly provocative in one loathsome character remarkably.
But as memorable as characters can be, the detective trope is but a crusty shell without the right pacing and multiple careful choices in narrative swerve to work off exhilarating tension and lightning-frantic ambiguity at every character move and crime scene mark. Thankfully, Knives Out’s narrative intertwining and use of character-miscommunication is a fine wine homage to golden age Agatha Christie stories and keeps a right balance of modernised drama and classic magnifying-glass-trawling vintage homage for you to eagerly examine each action at a different angle until it inevitably hits you that you should’ve looked at it ‘that’ way. A good level of effective, convenient humour is also balanced with concrete friction with pupil-swerving paranoia to shape each character well behind their remarkable personas, making Knives Out a fantastic comedy-drama.
But a detail I found rather oddly surreal was the film’s rather hefty casual use of smartphones, which are hardly used in general film, especially in a whodunit set amongst an old traditional family in a countryside mansion. This builds a cleverly ambiguous way of seeing these characters, who could be using their casual passive devices as a shielding method of intentionally seeming unimportant or are simply being their everyday swiping selves. This is a new, well-utilised way of obscuring suspicion in the observer, and is just one of many ways Knives Out staples itself as a delightfully refreshing film full of top-notch performances and a chilling surrounding narrative with enough engagingly possible loopholes to attach all of Jeremy Clarkson’s car keys.