"My Coffee. My House. My Rules."

Rating: 8/10 (14 February 2020)

"My Coffee. My House. My Rules."
It's so comforting to watch a film by a director that knows exactly what they want. Like a movie by Spielberg, Scorsese, Tarantino, and Fincher, Rian Johnson has his own distinctive style that adapts to different genres and is pretty effective every time. Like a well trained musician, Johnson knows how to play the notes, hit the beats, and please an audience. Yes, that includes The Last Jedi, which let's remind ourselves, was adored by many critics and audiences despite its reputation. To further the point, Knives Out makes it obvious that Johnson tries to please an audience by the way the movie challenges them, rather than comfort them with familiar tropes. In a sort of Shyamalanian, even Hitchockian, kind of way, Johnson has a need to surprise, an urgency to dissuade the audience from the ability to predict, and for that I am very grateful. When you don't really know where the story is going, you are all the more immersed in it.
Knives Out does this in a spectacular fashion. It's so uncharacteristic of a murder-mystery to show the audience the murder itself only forty minutes into the film. Nevertheless, there is still a teasing mystery to be solved by the private detective Benoit Blanc played by Daniel Craig. By the way, who knew Craig can be this charismatic!? The film transforms into a Hitchcock thriller in the second act, with Johnson using every trick in the book to make Blanc's discovery of the culprit a nerve-racking experience akin to watching Dial M For Murder.
What's most surprising to me is the film's comedic nature. This felt like a true comedy disguised as a murder-mystery, rather than a murder-mystery with some comedic bits in it. Every scene has jokes in it. Every single one. And they land in such a way that makes this one of the best theater going experiences an audience can have. I was fortunate enough to see this in a theater and the audible laughter proved it was a smart decision. Johnson is able to create quirky, layered, and engrossing characters and have them convincingly and hysterically play off each other. This is of course helped by an impressive star-studded cast. The actors are so tuned-in to not only who their character is, but how they should relate to the other characters. As amazing as Jamie Lee Curtis, Michael Shannon, Don Johnson, Christopher Plummer, Toni Collette, Chris Evans and Daniel Craig are, the film belongs to Ana de Armas. The way she plays the character with such earnestness and truth is the heart of the story, the true extension of Harlan Thrombey who is displeased by the double-faced nature of his actual offspring. Kudos to Johnson and the casting director for a memorable ensemble.
Straight off the undeserved backlash of The Last Jedi, Johnson has created another movie classic, and proves once again that he is truly a modern day filmmaking genius in his own right, and I look forward to the next Benoit Blanc tale he is going to spin in this movie's sequel. And perhaps, another Star Wars film? One can only hope. But another Johnson murder mystery will in the mean time fill the hole in the donut of anticipation.