glass onion review

“again, it’s like poetry, so that they rhyme. every stanza kind of rhymes with the last one. hopefully it’ll work.”

i’m so sorry, as soon as i realized that quote was actually super appropriate for this movie, i just had to.

i asked myself a few questions when i heard rian johnson was going to be making several knives out sequels. chief among them was how in the world he was going to catch this particular lightning in a second bottle.

i mean, obviously following a detective from case to case is nothing new in the murder mystery genre, like that’s kind of their whole thing, right? but knives out was no typical murder mystery. aside from the just absolutely immaculate filmmaking and the incredibly joyful daniel craig performance, the second movie was going to be missing a lot of the intangibles that made the first one so resoundingly perfect. (you know, unless it wasn’t.)

i knew glass onion would be assembling a similar powerhouse cast, but it just felt like the thrombeys were going to be a hard act to follow. and all their rich white bullshit was so integral to what made the movie so great, with blanc immediately glomming on to one of the few people intimately involved in the case who wasn’t a rich asshole. so that element was just going to be completely missing. (you know, unless it wasn’t.)

the setting, too. the setting was just such a fucking powerful mood. the whole “the guy practically lives in a clue board” thing was just going to be hard to match, right? (you know, unless it wasn’t.)

but maybe the biggest thing missing, as previously alluded to, was unquestionably marta. i’ve written before that while the structure of the movie owes a lot to blanc’s personality & method, the heart of the movie belongs entirely to marta. i sort of super liked the idea of marta becoming his watson in a more full-time way, but that obviously would’ve been a somewhat unrealistic move for her character, so i understood why glass onion wasn’t going to take that direction. but it was just a shame that the movie didn’t even have a character who was roughly analogous to her. so that dimension of the movie was just going to be completely missing. (... you know, unless it wasn’t.)

okay, i’m belaboring this and the solution is actually pretty fucking obvious. the same people who assembled all of those elements in the first movie were the same ones building this movie. i mean, duh. and yeah, nothing is ever going to be exactly knives out, but you sort of don’t want it to be, right? you want it to be something new, something that’s its own thing, but you still want it to have the same core, the same central spark, that made you love knives out. you want it to be of the same kind. at least, that’s what i wanted. and that’s absolutely what i got.

the structure of glass onion is superficially very different. at first given what we had heard of the plot and even from just absorbing the first act of the movie as it came to us, i started to think we were getting a much more traditional whodunit than we did in knives out? and moreover, rather than being in complete control of the situation and alternating between seeming exactly that in control or acting befuddled when it suited him, blanc seemed actually befuddled? and it was kind of terrifying?

it reminded me of my first experience watching knives out. for the entire first long stretch of the movie you just think you’re watching a pretty typical murder mystery. and then there’s that plot twist that hits you like a ton of bricks, and you’re just like, “well fuck, we’re in a completely different movie than i thought we were.” and given that that’s like kind of one of the biggest magic tricks knives out pulled, i really shouldn’t have fallen for it a second time??? but of course i fucking did because rian johnson is one of the absolute masters of sweeping you up in a story that weaponizes your expectations and taking joy in misdirecting you so it can later take even more joy in including you in the joke.

but the thing that really makes this tick is that we’ve once again assembled a cast of fully-realized characters. all of these people actually feel like they could be real people while simultaneously being positioned in relation to each other in such a way as to create the web of intrigue you need for a great murder mystery. there is so much thought put into every tiny aspect of each character, mirroring the overall attention to detail that’s devoted to the rest of the movie.

i think this is basically just as good as knives out, which i will remind you is one of my favorite movies of all time. i’ll obviously need to devote quite a few more rewatches to it before i can really say something like that with confidence, but it’s good enough that we literally went and saw it again in theaters the next time we were able to even though it’s going to be on netflix literally a few weeks from now. and i’m going to watch it as soon as it’s on netflix. more than once. it’s the kind of movie that absolutely rewards rewatching, just like its predecessor.

my expectations for this movie were sky high, and it met and exceeded those despite the inherent difficulty curve of trying to pull off something like this again. at this point i trust rian johnson like i trust very few other filmmakers. and while i know there are probably plenty of other movies he’d like to make, i kind of wouldn’t hate it if he just kept making new knives out movies once every two years or so. i will never get tired of these if they keep being this good. s-rank