Along with some of Christie’s best work, the history of the ensemble whodunit includes monk detectives, werewolf breaks, board-games adaptations, lots of murdered rich people, the sole screenwriting credit for Stephen Sondheim, and a whole lot of “Oh my God, look at that cast!”Ī good whodunit can inspire an insatiable appetite for star-studded suspects, surprising motives, and shocking reveals. Johnson’s Oscar-worthy original screenplay owes a lot to author Agatha Christie (especially as Johnson’s detective Benoit Blanc plays as a take on Agatha Christie’s goofy Belgian savant Hercule Poirot), but his mystery follows a long tradition of whodunit movies where storytellers have attempted a type of narrative engineering that can be bad (looking at you, 2017’s Crooked House) but never lazy. But one of the greatest thrills is in seeing some of today’s best actors combine their charisma for what is essentially high-stakes character work it’s worth the ticket price alone to see the likes of Toni Collette, Jamie Lee Curtis, Michael Shannon, and Chris Evans play characters who look like they could kill each other, and could have all plausibly killed their family patriarch, played by Christopher Plummer. Rian Johnson’s Knives Out proves to audiences that there are still, in 2019, numerous joys to be found in the classic whodunit film - the salacious central crime, the storyteller’s crafty reveal of everyone’s motive, and all of the satisfying ways an investigation twists and turns the story’s events.
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