“Knives Out” Works By Not Trying Too Hard
A love letter to Agatha Christie adds something new without needing to out-clever the master.
Agatha Christie single-handedly created and refined a style of mystery story: a locked-room murder, a constrained ensemble of colorful suspects, and an unusually perceptive “outsider” detective there to figure out whodunit. Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes may have suggested the archetype for the detective, but Christie married it with her own formula elements across literally billions of printed books— the form is so familiar and so frequently riffed on that it’s easy to forget that it’s the contribution of essentially one writer.
“It was the one you least suspect!” is a favorite way of characterizing the reveal at the end of a good mystery. Christie’s are said to be like this, although usually it’s not so much that you least expect the murderer, just that the reveal is not particularly easy (or possible) to guess at until it happens.
But! Three books stand out among the 80-ish that she published. They are exceptions to her formula, attempts to transcend the format itself — and all were published in the first decades of her prolific half-century: And Then There Were None (1939), Murder On The Orient Express (1934), and The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd (1926).
These books are special because they are varying levels of “meta” mysteries. The murderers are (spoilers ahead): one of the murder victims (!), all of the suspects together (!!), and the narrator of the book (!!!), respectively. The first of them doesn’t even offer a conventional detective character. You really don’t suspect the ending in these stories and they are genuinely surprising if you’re coming to them for the first time.
As a result, some combination of these three books are often rightly cited as Christie’s masterworks. They are more widely read, more frequently adapted to film and TV, and are perversely better remembered as being “classic” Christie stories than all those other ones. In some ways, Christie’s three meta-story masterpieces were endgame entries in the genre: she used them early on to explore the outer limits of her story form, and it’s difficult (impossible?) to go further without that framework collapsing outright. The vast majority of her books were less overtly clever — in most of them, the murderer is just one of the regular suspects.
Knives Out (2019), written and directed by gifted genre thinker Rian Johnson, is a garden-variety Christie par excellence. Crucially, this film doesn’t attempt to out-twist-and-turn the audience’s expectations, and in so doing it ends up being itself surprising. So many modern whodunit stories (Christie pastiches and others) insist on blowing your mind so many times that they’re more conspiracy-theory academic exercise than manageable story.
I watched Knives Out expecting to be dragged along by some meta-surprise: Daniel Craig was actually the murderer! The old man was really still alive!
But — delightfully — none of that happened. Because we are all drowning in a popular culture constantly trying to subvert itself with more cleverness, I was expecting a Roger Ackroyd or a Westing Game or even Verbal Kint reveal — and so I was actually surprised that the murderer was just.. one of the family members! That really was what I was least expecting!
Johnson of course also introduced some novelties: showing the audience Harlan Thrombey’s death, in detail, early in the film was a refreshing move, and then it was classic Christie to re-frame those happenings as part of the ending reveal. Having Ana de Armas’s Marta character — as opposed to Craig’s detective — be the protagonist of the story was also a smart and fresh choice that creates narrative opportunities and allows the story breathe better on screen than, say, an off-the-shelf Hercule Poirot retread.
There are plenty of other lovely comic and story moments in Knives Out that make it a strong and new entry in the whodunit genre. In form, it is unexpectedly traditionalist. Its ambition lies not in trying to smash new meta-narrative boundaries but in variation on the pastiche. The result is a unusually satisfying film. Dame Agatha would have been proud.
