If you go to the cinema and enjoy a film that I didn’t, then I am happy for you. My view is not all encompassing and sacreligious. Not all films are my cup of tea. If you enjoyed the latest blockbuster that I found boring, great. I really am pleased for you. If you didn’t enjoy the weird indie flick I liked, that’s fine as well. I’m sad you didn’t enjoy what you spent time and money on, but have no resentment over your film taste. Despite your prior beliefs, this blog is not gospel and I mention this before I review Knives Out as I find it leaves me in an awkward place. I can see why others liked this film a lot, but I really struggled to connect with it.

Knives out is written as a comedy/murder mystery. On crime writer Harlan Thrombey’s (Christopher Plummer) birthday party, he appears to commits suicide, however all is not as it seems *shock* as an anonymous donor has paid for private detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) to investigate. The primary focus of the story is Marta (Ana De Armas), Harlan’s carer, who clearly knows more than she is letting on. She os accompanied by a top cast of Thrombey’s sinister family members including Jamie Lee Curtis, Chris Evans, Michael Shannon and Toni Colette, to name a few. Similarly to death in paradise it attempts to somewhat split the comedy from the story, however this really fails in Craig’s dreadful attempt at an American accent. Every time he spoke, my immersion into the film was ruined, whether a suspenseful, emotional or funny part, he just couldn’t shake the accent off.

The murder story itself was okay. My parents almost exclusively liked murder mystery shows when I grew up, so I’ve seen my fair share. Therefore, with such an experience I found it all to be a little bit predictable and I’d guessed most of what was going to happen with the important clues long before they were revealed. It’s almost a shame they release too much information too soon in the film which paints Marta in a slightly worse light as it would’ve been better if they could’ve revealed it all so we’d learn it at the same time as Blanc. However, they were able to get a couple of comedy gags from it, like Marta awkwardly trying to tamper with evidence. 

The gags were barely passable. I didn’t laugh once, but Stratford’s finest Wednesday night vue cinephiles did. Craig’s character goes on and on about a doughnut within a doughnut for a minute or so which is meant to be hilarious. However, the superglue within meant I wasn’t in stitches. [Insert comedy is subjective disclaimer].  The one thing I did find somewhat amusing was how incredibly caricature some of the villains were. Shannon provided a classic Shannon performance that we’d see in The Shape Of Water and the rest of the family followed suit.

For the amount of time that Marta was on screen, I was disappointed how little I cared about her. She had so much to lose, her mum was an undocumented immigrant, she had an emotional attachment to the victim. She doesn’t have much money unlike everyone else who were incredibly rich. However, I wasn’t bothered as there was enough going on for me to not care.

My overall issue with Knives Out was the amount of pussyfooting it does. The comedy elements are there so much so that we don’t get a great crime movie. However, the directors seem so scared and non-committal that it’s not a great horror film. Why, in the posters, is everyone wearing luminous fun colours and looking overly evil, but then in the actual film they look dull and samey? If you’re doing a comedy then please go for it, otherwise you end up in an awkward middle ground  like this film does without really knowing its own identity.

Some praise does need to be given to the set design. The house looks wonderful and the imagery of the throne of knives is also fantastic. This is complemented with a classical score which while working at times, was never able to capture the gravitas of the more tense moments.

Summary

Knives Out never quite knows what it wants to be, awkwardly shuffling between serious murder mystery and outright comedy. It’s a film that thinks it’s smarter than it is. Despite this, there is definitely enough there to keep some audiences entertained. [Grade: C]