Rian Johnson’s Glass Onion evades the curse of Netflix by pulling together a great cast, beautifully arranged plot, and some new social critique for the sophomore entry into the Knives Out franchise. There is a special place in my heart for original content, unmoored from any intellectual property, whether it’s 90s movies based on 60s television shows or the shambling corpse of comic book nostalgia which has plagued the blockbuster spots for nearly a decade, insisting on overstaying its welcome. In the mystery department moreso than most other genre films, it’s important to be able to create a bench of talented directors who can reliably spin whodunits, otherwise we’re left with the adaptations of Agatha Christie that are re-warmed (2017, 2022, 2023) in the microwave by daddy Poirot as played by Kenneth Branaugh. Which is not to knock the adaptations! It can be very fun to point out to your friends that couple! is! gay! and that’s new! but surely it’s not fun to already know who’s done the big boo boo even if the reason why they’ve done the boo boo is different than the original. It’s one of the reasons why Wife and I were so gaga over PBS Masterpiece’s Guilt, which is a bit of a mystery in reverse and doesn’t really have much to do with this movie we’re talking about, but it’s worth mentioning just in case you are also in the mood for something fresh. Back to Glass Onion, this franchise movie that’s not a sequel but sorta kinda tries to maintain the spiritual energy from one picture to the next ad infinitum as a business plan, I’m assuming.
Glass Onion has a lot of things going for it beyond its packed ensemble cast. The “twist,” which we don’t need to spoil in order to talk about, has enough momentum to make watching the entire duration of the film interesting a second time. What makes Glass Onion stand out for me is the fact that so much of the clues to the crime are available to the audience, rather than captured only by the astute mind of a stuffy Sherlockian genius. Watching, you have at your disposal the visual and sonic tools to solve the crime. The “mystery” relies on self deception and gaslighting of the audience by the villain(s).
To get in the weeds a little and just brush by some spoilers, there are a dizzying number of murders in this movie as the cast of characters expands and contracts, accordion-like, even factoring out obvious and less obvious winks to the red herring characters of the genre. The replay of the plot also doubles or even triples the number of real and unreal deaths and characters that we observe in the course of the one viewing of the movie, which is impressive and goes to show how crisply complex yet small and tidy this “Fibonacci”-shaped plot has been packaged for us.
But the structural complexity of this movie is mere window dressing for the main affair of Glass Onion, the ensemble casts’ exquisite roasts of the culture villains de jour. It is the reason why Knives Out movies have a long runway in the sense that there seem to be an endless number of movies that could be produced by that they require time in between each film in order to allow for society to coalesce around a common, shared vision of new villains. Knives Out has a clear critique of the elements of Trump and Trumpism even as audiences were still coming to grips with what those characters would look like when showcased in fiction. Glass Onion, as part of the sophomore class of pandemic films, critiques the villains of the pandemic and post-“pando” era, even finds the roots of our post-“pando” villains through the showcasing of the little character traits that the pandemic revealed and exaggerated (but did not necessarily create): the careless anti-maskers, the clumsy privilege that allowed for the phrase “essential” workers to mean almost exclusively to “expendable,” the self-radicalized internet cretins we all became, some more than others, because of the way that we were or were not “bubbled” with politically complementary people or not.
In Glass Onion, we have all the angles of these ugly parts of ourselves, like a fun house mirror or a Cubist painting: Hahn playing the feckless, scared shitless, yielding-to-the-whims-of-wealth-financiers politician, Aaron Burr as the spineless, mercenary scientist, Bautista as the momma’s-boy-turned-self-radicalized-misogynist, the cancel culture survivor and the new brand of clout chaser, etc., etc.
The question I had after finishing this movie is one that I can actually answer for you: with all the rewinds and flashbacks, is it satisfying to rewatch the movie in its entirety? Cut to Wife, who had the pleasure of seeing this film in theaters a month ago for its abbreviated theatrical release: “The impression I get from seeing it a second time without falling asleep briefly due to the comfiness of the chairs we were sitting in is that the social media caricatures, the rich billionaire, the clueless anti-masker, the men’s rights activist seem to have been chosen because they were trendy and relevant, but ended up filling the ensemble with a bunch of people who aren’t realistic and believable, who don’t have sympathetic or reasonable motivations for what they do.
“In the first Knives Out, everyone just wanted to inherit (which made them all reasonable actors) and Ana de Armas was there to ground the film. In this movie, the social commentary feels stupid–making fun of an eccentric billionaire is not new or biting as the battle between inherited wealth and immigrants. Who is the person who is rooting for the billionaire?
“In part, the quick character studies are a riff on Agatha Christie, the way she could introduce a person in a sentence that would fully encapsulate their being, but (Rian Johnson’s characters) are not super believable.” Wife mentions some more things about the way that setting the film in the pandemic actually frees up this shortform character sketch mechanism for the director, which is a cool point, because it sets Glass Onion in a genre of pandemic movies.
I had a chance to talk to some Friends and siblings this evening who had seen the movie last night, with varying levels of familiarity with the original movie, and in all cases they were more pleased with this movie than they were with a third of the holiday parties we jointly attended, so that’s something. I’m giving this movie two and a half Babadooks.
Honestly On The Sly 