A buoyant mystery

Rating: 8/10 (6 March 2020)

Watching a thriller was never this delightful without being nail-biting or too dependent on the stereotypically eerie background score to "elevate" suspense.
Crime/suspense thrillers are known to throw in frivolous details and then sweeping out the viewer with the plot making them forget their hunches (if any) and then those same details come to play to help solve the mystery in the end or the help explain why they are there in the first place (Chekhov's gun technique)
A good thriller has the most unexpected endings/ plot twists depsite tipping the viewers (sometimes misleading) to make them feel like they know what's been going on all along. Teasing them and catching them off-guard despite giving them the whole knowledge of the events. This movie did exactly that and more, taking the story to a whole another plane.
Having watched a good deal of suspense thrillers, I suspected that missing of Naloxene wasn't just a mistake and there was more it to it than just an honest mistake of Martha's and Ransom's involvement in Harlan's murder, with his name being the innuendo (this sounds absurd). But they deft-handedly weaved the whole chronicle giving the satisfaction of big reveal in the end. Had it been just an honest screw-up by Martha (which it most convincingly depicts itself as) and an awkward cover-up henceforth, would have made this one just another plain-vanilla prosaic picture. But the clandestine sketches and the generous offer of Harlan at the right time and strange idiosyncrasies like Martha's gag reflex to lying etc..make this movie more blithely amusing.
P.S: My '9' is the standard '10' and my '8' is the standard '9'