Knives Out | Film Review

Hey Guys x

It's the first day of Blogmas, but as I said in my 'Blogmas 2019' post, I will be putting up non-Blogmas related film reviews during December, and as I saw this yesterday (and had been waiting to see it for ages) it definitely made the cut.

When a man dies on his 85th birthday, everyone is a suspect - including his entire family and everyone who worked for him. So when Detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) arrives on the scene, he has just one job - find the killer.

Weirdly, I loved this film and was disappointed with it, almost in equal measure - though in the end, my love beat out the disappointment.

I'll try to go into my disappointment without spoilers, but let's just say that if you're a fan of typical murder mysteries, then this is very different to what you're used to. In a way, I almost don't want it to be labelled in that way - but there's no other way to categorise a film like this, so the 'whodunnit' angle makes complete sense, it's just different to what a traditional murder mystery is. And if I was telling people to watch it, I would just describe it as a drama/thriller.

I was also disappointed with who the killer ended up being, which again is a spoiler that I'm not going to give away. But because of the way that everything is set up, the motives and the personalities of all the characters, the full explanation of everything (while extremely smart and well written/thought out) felt like a bit of a cop-out.

However, that's not to say that this is a bad film, or a bad murder mystery at all, because it isn't.

Although it starts off slow, as soon as the pace picks up, you don't really notice because you're already invested in the story. The thing with murder-mysteries is that the whole point is to get to the end, to see the full story. But with this, the events that lead up to the end are just as important as what really happened. There's nothing that you'd fast forward because there are so many small things that you don't really think about until everything is explained.

There are also a great set of characters in this movie. Of course, we know most of the actors from different works, of which they are brilliant - in the movie we have Daniel Craig, Chris Evans (Ransom Drysdale), Ana De Armas (Marta Cabrera), Jamie Lee Curtis (Linda Drysdale), Michael Shannon (Walt Thrombey), Toni Collette (Joni Thrombey), Don Johnson (Richard Drysdale) and Lakeith Stanfield (Detective Lieutenant Elliot) as well as many others, and they are all amazing in this movie.
They all play characters that are so different to what they're generally known for, and they all do a great job. This is set out as an ensemble film, and even though there's a clear main character in the movie, all of their performances are really integral to the outcome of the film, and as I've said, they all do a great job.

A lot of things within this movie are typical to murder-mysteries (for example, most of the motives for murder), but the thing that sets this movie apart is the writing and direction. Rian Johnson, who directed, produced and wrote this movie, did an amazing job with it. All of the dialogue in the movie is written extremely well, so well that a character could say one word, and you know that that word couldn't be said convincingly by any other character. It was so specific and so precise that you can tell every word was chosen carefully, and nothing seemed out of place. And that's not even taking into account how funny it was. Because while this film is not and should not be marketed as a comedy, there were parts of it where the whole cinema was laughing out loud, because the humour is hilarious while being really real. There was no better way to get to know these characters than through their individual brands of humour, and Rian definitely played on that.
And that goes for the direction as well. While I wish that some scenes had taken place at different points in time, that doesn't change the fact that this movie is extremely well directed. With a film like this, events can definitely become confused, and secondary characters can begin to morph into one another when the spotlight is only shone on 3 of ten, but this film didn't suffer from that at all. You can kind of see the story in storyboard form when you're watching it, because every scene holds a clue, and every clue is so distinct that the film wouldn't work without them.

Overall, this is a funny, well-written film with a group of amazing actors that some will love and others will hate. Whether you believe that the reveal lets it down or not, you won't regret having watched it.

7.5/10

Lou