GLASS ONION: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY***** - BFI London Film Festival - Closing Night Gala

I was not the world's biggest fan of KNIVES OUT - Rian Johnson's closed-house murder-mystery starring Daniel Craig as the detective with the broad southern drawl. I sat stony silent in a packed London Film Festival screening with the rest of the audience having the time of their life.  I thought the mystery wasn't complex or interesting and the performances fell flat for me. I just didn't get it. As a result, I had zero expectations for its high-budget sequel, GLASS ONION, and was cringing at the thought of its two-hour twenty minutes running time. 

Well reader, I can happily report that GLASS ONION is one of my favourite movies of the year!  It flew by its running time in a haze of laugh-out loud comedy; brilliantly-acted outlandish characters; and a proper mystery that's both tricksy, meta-textual and politically biting!

The movie stars Daniel Craig, once again returning as Benoit Blanc, and leaning even further into the camp of a fussily over-dressed and anachronistic famous detective in the Agatha Christie style. The new villain of the piece is Ed Norton's tech billionaire Miles Bron, clearly based on Elon Musk. He's a vainglorious fake-hippie who invites all of his old college friends to a yearly retreat, this time on his supervillain island lair.  As the movie unfolds, in good detective tradition, we realise that each of the characters needs Miles for his money or connections and has a motive to kill him. There's even a MacGuffin - a piece of a new renewable energy-producing crystal widget that is also - oh no! - rather dangerous!

The heart of the piece - or maybe its moral compass in a sea of characters that are more or less self-interested and despicable - is Janelle Monae's Andi Brand.  As the movie unfolds we discover that Andi was in fact the brains behind Miles' big invention and they haven't really spoken in years. So why has she shown up on the island? And who invited Benoit?

The first half of the movie explores the connections between the characters and leads us to the murder. The second half of the film goes back and reveals what was really happening. This might sound tedious but it's so damn clever, smart and involving I promise you it won't feel like a rehash. But I can't tell you exactly why it works for fear of spoiling the plot - so I'll just encourage you to watch.

GLASS ONION: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 139 minutes. It played Toronto 2022 and will be released on Netflix on December 23rd.

ON THE ROCKS

Laura is a thirtysomething young mother whose husband is always travelling with work. Her life has been subsumed by getting the kids from A to B, and as much as she loves them, she's struggling to create the mental space to focus on writing her new book. Even worse, rather than having a rich inner intellectual life, she's stuck listening to other mums complain about their dating lives.  And even when Laura's husband Dean does coming home from yet another travel trip, he's exhausted, she's exhausted, the conversation gets mired in the bureaucratic minutiae of family life.  Things hit a tipping point when Dean drunkenly starts having sex with Laura but pulls back when he realises it's her. And then she finds his hot colleague Fiona's beauty kit in HIS suitcase. Is he having an affair?

Laura confides in her father Felix who argues that Dean probably is having an affair, because heck, that's what men do.  Felix seems to relish spending time with Laura as they tail Dean through New York and even to Mexico to uncover evidence of his misdeeds. And all of this makes for a hilarious buddy comedy that could easily serve as a prequel for a detective duo TV show. Rashida Jones (Laura) and Bill Murray (Felix) have real chemistry and it's just an absolute blast seeing them slope around Manhattan together in his absurd red sports car just being charismatic and witty and rogueish in that Bill Murray way. And we also get a side order of comedic genius from Jenny Slate (LANDLINE) as the hilariously self-involved school mum.

But there's so much more going on in this film. It's almost as if Bill Murray is back in THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS but this time he's playing the Gene Hackman role.  Laura's willingness to suspect her husband of infidelity is clearly coloured by being raised in a broken home. Likewise, her father's willingness to think Dean is cheating is coloured by his own predilections.   It's clear that Laura feels lost and hurt.  But is any of that her husband's fault?  Or is this just motherhood damaging her sense of self, and thus self-esteem.  And is that lack of self-esteem in her marriage bringing up issues around her own childhood and her father's infidelity.  

So, from my perspective, this film isn't about whether the husband cheated or not at all. And that's why the Marlon Wayans character, Dean, is so vacuous.  We actually don't care about him, and maybe neither do the lead characters. In the words of Laura, "what if I'm just in a rut?" And also paraphrasing from Laura, what if her dad just wants to spend more time with her?  And from writer-director Sofia Coppola (THE BEGUILED), maybe the shadow Laura is trying to move out from under isn't that of motherhood but her larger-than-life dad?  

ON THE ROCKS is rated R and has a running time of 96 minutes. It is streaming on Apple TV+.