Rian Johnson carried the idea for Knives Out around from the mid-2000s, and the film has the confidence of something that waited its turn. A bestselling crime novelist, Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer), turns 85, throws a party for his family, and is found dead the next morning with his throat cut. The police call it suicide. Benoit Blanc, hired by an anonymous client, does not. That is the whole engine, and Johnson, who wrote the script himself in six or seven months, builds an entire film out of keeping it running.

The timing matters. Johnson came to this straight after Star Wars: The Last Jedi, a film that divided audiences, and The Guardian reads Knives Out as a return to the ground of his earlier work: an updated homage to the Agatha Christie whodunnits he loved as a child, and to those cheekily self-aware screen adaptations in which Peter Ustinov led an all-star cast through a labyrinthine murder. Johnson has described the appeal of that kind of cinema as a slightly meta conversation between filmmaker and viewer, a set of shared ground rules that can be assumed and then bent. You can feel him enjoying it. He shot between October and December 2018, in suburban Boston, on a $40 million budget backed by MRC and Massachusetts tax subsidies.

The ensemble would sell the picture on its own, but it is Daniel Craig who sets the tone. He plays Blanc as a cigar-smoking, coin-flipping interloper with a southern accent so outrageous that Ransom nicknames him the “CSI-KFC”, as The Guardian points out. Casey Movie Mania calls him a Hercule Poirot-like detective and admits the drawl took some getting used to. That is a fair warning. A Poirot from the Deep South is an absurd idea, and Craig commits to it without winking, which is why Blanc works as a character and not just a bit.

Ana de Armas has the harder job. Her Marta Cabrera, Harlan’s nurse, carries what The Guardian quotes as a “regurgitative reaction to mistruths”: she throws up when she lies. It sounds like a sitcom gag, and it is one, but it also does structural work. Marta cannot lie, yet she is hiding something. So she answers every question accurately and incompletely, and the film turns that narrow gap into suspense. When the will is read and Marta is left the entire fortune, the Thrombeys are stunned, and the scene stings because the whole family has treated her as staff and not as someone who could matter to the old man. Casey Movie Mania notes that Johnson gives her considerably more screen time than anyone else in the cast and calls it her best role since Blade Runner 2049. I would not argue.

Around her, the family is a pack of leeches, and The Guardian is gleefully specific about each of them. Chris Evans is the black-sheep grandson Ransom, “oozing privilege”, heard arguing with Harlan on the night of the party. Evans, says Casey Movie Mania, clearly has a lot of fun with the no-good grandson, and it shows. Michael Shannon, playing against type, is the faintly snivelling Walt, whose publishing fortune hangs on his father’s favour. Don Johnson is the son-in-law Richard, described as a “Trumpy horror with a wandering eye”. Toni Collette’s widowed lifestyle guru Joni channels, in The Guardian’s words, a goopy Gwyneth Paltrow. And Jamie Lee Curtis, as the eldest daughter Linda, is in what the paper calls career-best form. Every one of them is funny, and none is a caricature drawn from nothing.

There is a cost. Casey Movie Mania is right that Curtis, Don Johnson, Collette and Shannon end up closer to extended cameos than full roles. A viewer lured in by that roster expects each of them to get a real stretch of the story, and they do not. The film chooses Marta and Blanc, and the rest of the family circles around them. I understand the choice and still wanted more of Shannon’s wounded pomposity.

Beneath the jokes, Knives Out has been read as a study of class warfare, wealth inequality, immigration and race in contemporary America, and the reading holds. The Guardian quotes the family being witheringly described as a bunch of “self-made over-achievers”, which sums up the film’s attitude in one line. These are people who inherited everything and call it merit. When their father’s fortune goes to the person who actually looked after him, they are left with nothing to say that does not expose them. Johnson never stops the story to lecture. The satire lives in who gets to be comfortable in the house and who has to prove she deserves to be there.

The craft keeps pace with the writing. Nathan Johnson’s classical score draws on his and Rian’s favourite symphonic film music, and it gives the picture the old-fashioned swell that a drawing-room mystery needs. The Guardian’s verdict is that none of the plot’s coiled springs would bite if we did not care about the characters, and that is exactly how it plays: the mystery is tidy, but what you take home is Marta, Blanc and the people circling them.

Knives Out premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 7, 2019, reached American cinemas through Lionsgate on November 27, and grossed $312 million. The National Board of Review and the American Film Institute named it one of the year’s best films. It collected three Golden Globe nominations, a BAFTA nomination and an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay. Critics were warm about the plot and the actors; the complaints that surfaced, such as Casey Movie Mania’s about cameo-sized parts, concern how the ensemble is used, not whether the film delivers.

It also started a series. Glass Onion followed in 2022 and Wake Up Dead Man in 2025, both with Blanc at the centre. The sequels had a lot to live up to, because the original is the one that made the formula look easy: a family, a corpse, a detective who is smarter than he sounds, and a young woman who cannot tell a lie.