The Daily Telegraph - Features
Dazzling whodunnit that doubles as sinister satire
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
12A cert, 139 min ★★★★★
Dir Rian Johnson
Starring Daniel Craig, Edward Norton, Kate Hudson, Dave Bautista, Janelle Monáe, Leslie Odom Jr, Kathryn Hahn
When Knives Out was unsheathed in 2019, the whodunnit was out of style. Give or take the odd notable case – Memento, Gosford Park,
another Murder on the Orient Express –the genre had been languishing undiscovered on the floor of the billiards room since the mid-1980s.
Three years later, thanks in no small part to Rian Johnson’s film, it’s well-and-truly back from the dead, and not just in cinemas: Only Murders in the Building has been a word-of-mouth TV hit, while “cosy crime” dominates the bestseller lists. Even video games joined in with Among Us, an online diversion in which 60 million people dabbled daily during the pandemic.
At the beginning of Glass Onion, The Last Jedi director’s preposterously entertaining Knives Out sequel, we learn that master detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) is among their number. Slumped in the bathtub, he’s playing against some notable opponents – two of whom, Angela Lansbury and Stephen Sondheim, are making their poignantly fitting final screen appearances.
As the star of Murder, She Wrote,
Lansbury’s expertise in the field is well known. As for Sondheim, the composer and lyricist also co-wrote 1973’s The Last of Sheila,
an ensemble thriller in which a glamorous scavenger hunt in the
Med goes awry. Johnson, clearly inspired by that half-forgotten gem, gives its premise a hilarious modern-day revamp. Here the setting is a private Greek island, to which Miles Bron (Edward Norton) – a Silicon Valley magnate with more than a faint musk of a certain Elon – has invited some of his oldest friends. They make a very 21st-century potpourri, including a much-cancelled fashionista (Kate Hudson), a puffed-up YouTube pundit (Dave Bautista) and a compromised political candidate (Kathryn Hahn). Among the others are Cassandra Brand (Janelle Monáe), Bron’s estranged ex-business partner, and Blanc himself, whose invitation arrived under mysterious circumstances, and who isn’t initially clear on which puzzle he’s been brought along to solve.
What begins as a genteel murder-mystery dinner soon descends into something more sinister – but as in Knives Out, part of the fun is working out exactly what’s amiss. Johnson’s screenplay is structured like a suite of virtuoso card tricks, with misdirection, callbacks and comic asides all working in concert to keep the viewer tickled and agog. The cast, clad in knockout resort-wear, are fully up to speed. Hudson luxuriates in her juiciest role in an age, Norton skewers tech-saviour inanity with laserprecision, while Craig brings the house down twice with two separate, outrageously satisfying climactic monologues, each delivered in Blanc’s trademark bourbon-sloshing Southern burr.
Like its precursor, Glass Onion doubles as a dazzlingly engineered gizmo and a raucous cautionary satire, with implications that billow out into the world even as its mechanisms snap satisfyingly shut.
In cinemas now and on Netflix from December 23