Knives out: Glass Onion (Netflix)

[Peelee]

If Duke actually did fire off that gun randomly into the air every few days, he would be in jail a long time ago. So he probably doesn't.

Even assuming that's the case, once you go to jail, you are never let out? This world has one draconian justice system.

[Fyraltari]

Even assuming that's the case, once you go to jail, you are never let out? This world has one draconian justice system.

Well, he is from the U.S.A...

[GloatingSwine]

If Duke actually did fire off that gun randomly into the air every few days, he would be in jail a long time ago. So he probably doesn't.

No, he doesn't.

His mom won't let him.

"Macho man" is his youtube persona though, and I bet he'd be the type to flash that gun on his videos, so it's pretty much what *everyone* knows about him.

[Tyndmyr]

If Duke actually did fire off that gun randomly into the air every few days, he would be in jail a long time ago. So he probably doesn't.

That entirely depends on where you live. Celebratory gunfire is a fairly normal thing in multiple cultures covering perhaps half the surface of the earth.

[Forum Explorer]

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How does it "trick" us though?

The difference between the two scenes for the audience is not actually whether Helen is there but why Benoit is there. The first time we see it we are given to assume that he has stumbled upon something embarrassing happening which will be relevant to something later because we're still expecting someone to be murdered, but the second time we know that he's actually investigating Duke because someone already has been murdered.

The scene has nothing to do with "Helen's deal" for the audience.

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Sure it does. Right from the start everyone is asking why 'Andi' attended the party. We are expecting something to be up with her and they've set things up so that we would expect a murder. And we hear a sound, and that initial scene makes us think that it's Benoit who made it.

It's deliberately misleading the audience so we can't guess the twist. Basically you couldn't see the twist coming that Andi is dead, and her twin sister replaced her for this party to investigate. It comes out of no where, and the movie does its best to hide that the twist exists at all, to the point of changing scenes so Helen isn't seen in them initially.

It is a trick, but I am not sure it is “dirty”. The same brain circuitry is involved, and the same external perceptual stream is involved (visual, aural, sound effect, etc) and two different people may have different responses. One may take joyful delight, the other see it as bad pool and dirty.

Much like the placebo effect (lessening pain), nocebo effect (increasing negativity), and attentional switching are all the same brain circuitry but one person feels better and one person can feel worse with the same stimuli.

I don't know, it ties into the whole

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investigating one mystery, and then it is revealed that, no wait, that mystery doesn't exist. The whole time the characters were investigating a completely different mystery that you didn't know about. The answer to our first mystery is revealed in the worst way.

[Ramza00]

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Sure it does. Right from the start everyone is asking why 'Andi' attended the party. We are expecting something to be up with her and they've set things up so that we would expect a murder. And we hear a sound, and that initial scene makes us think that it's Benoit who made it.

It's deliberately misleading the audience so we can't guess the twist. Basically you couldn't see the twist coming that Andi is dead, and her twin sister replaced her for this party to investigate. It comes out of no where, and the movie does its best to hide that the twist exists at all, to the point of changing scenes so Helen isn't seen in them initially.

I don't know, it ties into the whole

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investigating one mystery, and then it is revealed that, no wait, that mystery doesn't exist. The whole time the characters were investigating a completely different mystery that you didn't know about. The answer to our first mystery is revealed in the worst way.

Let me rephrase what you wrote in a way I think can establish a dialogue and a meeting of minds between us

Includes a video that talks about the first Knives Out to illustrate my point.

Spoiler: Rian Johnson loves non linear stories, and also attentional shifts

Show

Rian Johnson loves non linear stories, and also attentional shifts for it prevents the story from getting stale in his style of storytelling.

For example in Knives Out 1 we have a mystery movie (a who dun it), a crime movie, and then a shift back into a mystery movie. We are swapping genre and formal story structure aka remixing both.



Note this is not just a Knives Out thing Rian Johnson also has done this in other movies that made him famous such as Looper (two people try to kill each other, and we find out they are different versions of the same person), the Last Jedi (different points of view from the same memory), and three famous episodes of Breaking Bad where we reconsider what drives the characters due to new developments.

(Rian Johnson is also famous for Brick and The Brothers Bloom, two movies I have not seen and thus will not comment on.)

RJ wants to know the why that drives us and that is the interesting aspect for him in his storytelling. The stories we tell ourselves to be inside larger stories, and attentional shifts and points of view is how RJ gets to show how humans are conflicted people.

So yeah Glass Onion starts off as a Mystery where we think everything is as its seens, then we are told it is an ongoing crime story in act 2 but we have too many suspects for the original crime and there are additional crimes layered onto it (the act 1), lots of references to Clue another mystery satire that RJ is aping and we are loving the over the top style of the story for each character is a character (something shared by many famous who dun it of times past.) Lastly we are shown the reveal where it was all there as we first saw it, but we got lost in the story.

Put another way RJ pulled a magic trick, as another famous movie of this genre but RJ was not connected too explained, each magic trick is 3 acts like a 3 act movie.

“Every great magic trick consists of three parts or acts.

The first part is called "The Pledge". The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird or a man. He shows you this object. Perhaps he asks you to inspect it to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But of course... it probably isn't.

The second act is called "The Turn". The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you're looking for the secret... but you won't find it, because of course you're not really looking. You don't really want to know. You want to be fooled. But you wouldn't clap yet. Because making something disappear isn't enough; you have to bring it back.

That's why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call "The Prestige".”

Of course whether you find the magician or the detective reveling the plot to be "satisfying" or not is up to you, it is that placebo effect / nocebo effect I was mentioning earlier. It is damn stupid or damn stupid it is brilliant.

It is okay not to enjoy

[Forum Explorer]

Let me rephrase what you wrote in a way I think can establish a dialogue and a meeting of minds between us

Includes a video that talks about the first Knives Out to illustrate my point.

Spoiler: Rian Johnson loves non linear stories, and also attentional shifts

Show

Rian Johnson loves non linear stories, and also attentional shifts for it prevents the story from getting stale in his style of storytelling.

For example in Knives Out 1 we have a mystery movie (a who dun it), a crime movie, and then a shift back into a mystery movie. We are swapping genre and formal story structure aka remixing both.



Note this is not just a Knives Out thing Rian Johnson also has done this in other movies that made him famous such as Looper (two people try to kill each other, and we find out they are different versions of the same person), the Last Jedi (different points of view from the same memory), and three famous episodes of Breaking Bad where we reconsider what drives the characters due to new developments.

(Rian Johnson is also famous for Brick and The Brothers Bloom, two movies I have not seen and thus will not comment on.)

RJ wants to know the why that drives us and that is the interesting aspect for him in his storytelling. The stories we tell ourselves to be inside larger stories, and attentional shifts and points of view is how RJ gets to show how humans are conflicted people.

So yeah Glass Onion starts off as a Mystery where we think everything is as its seens, then we are told it is an ongoing crime story in act 2 but we have too many suspects for the original crime and there are additional crimes layered onto it (the act 1), lots of references to Clue another mystery satire that RJ is aping and we are loving the over the top style of the story for each character is a character (something shared by many famous who dun it of times past.) Lastly we are shown the reveal where it was all there as we first saw it, but we got lost in the story.

Put another way RJ pulled a magic trick, as another famous movie of this genre but RJ was not connected too explained, each magic trick is 3 acts like a 3 act movie.



Of course whether you find the magician or the detective reveling the plot to be "satisfying" or not is up to you, it is that placebo effect / nocebo effect I was mentioning earlier. It is damn stupid or damn stupid it is brilliant.

It is okay not to enjoy

Spoiler

Show

Oh, in general I've been a huge fan of RJ's work. And I'll say that the Last Jedi is downright the only movie in the sequel trilogy that's worth a damn.

But in Glass Onion there is a small but critical difference. See, in Knives Out, we, the audience, apparently know what happened, even if the characters don't. Which is fine, even as it is revealed that what we thought happened wasn't what actually happened. There were clues that things weren't all what they seemed, and the characters never were hiding the information from us.

In Glass Onion, Benoit knows that a murder was committed. But we don't. We the audience know less than the characters. And the movie goes out of its way to keep it that way with scenes like the Benoit spying on Duke spying on Whisky thing.

It's the difference between 'hey lets try and figure this out' vs 'show me what happened because there is no point in me trying'. The former is a lot more engaging than the latter.

[Razade]

Let me rephrase what you wrote in a way I think can establish a dialogue and a meeting of minds between us

Includes a video that talks about the first Knives Out to illustrate my point.

Spoiler: Rian Johnson loves non linear stories, and also attentional shifts

Show

Rian Johnson loves non linear stories, and also attentional shifts for it prevents the story from getting stale in his style of storytelling.

For example in Knives Out 1 we have a mystery movie (a who dun it), a crime movie, and then a shift back into a mystery movie. We are swapping genre and formal story structure aka remixing both.



Note this is not just a Knives Out thing Rian Johnson also has done this in other movies that made him famous such as Looper (two people try to kill each other, and we find out they are different versions of the same person), the Last Jedi (different points of view from the same memory), and three famous episodes of Breaking Bad where we reconsider what drives the characters due to new developments.

(Rian Johnson is also famous for Brick and The Brothers Bloom, two movies I have not seen and thus will not comment on.)

RJ wants to know the why that drives us and that is the interesting aspect for him in his storytelling. The stories we tell ourselves to be inside larger stories, and attentional shifts and points of view is how RJ gets to show how humans are conflicted people.

So yeah Glass Onion starts off as a Mystery where we think everything is as its seens, then we are told it is an ongoing crime story in act 2 but we have too many suspects for the original crime and there are additional crimes layered onto it (the act 1), lots of references to Clue another mystery satire that RJ is aping and we are loving the over the top style of the story for each character is a character (something shared by many famous who dun it of times past.) Lastly we are shown the reveal where it was all there as we first saw it, but we got lost in the story.

Put another way RJ pulled a magic trick, as another famous movie of this genre but RJ was not connected too explained, each magic trick is 3 acts like a 3 act movie.



Of course whether you find the magician or the detective reveling the plot to be "satisfying" or not is up to you, it is that placebo effect / nocebo effect I was mentioning earlier. It is damn stupid or damn stupid it is brilliant.

It is okay not to enjoy

That video is predicated on a pretty faulty premise. That the Crime Mystery isn't a sub genre in its own right, so well established that Knives Out leans heavily on the influences that solidified it as a concept in the first place. We don't even need to bring up Agatha Christie here, which Knives Out and Glass Onion are firmly touching on, because there's an entire sub genre of the sub genre called Cozies that Knives Out and Glass Onion are swimming in. Neither film shifts genres, they're firmly within a singular genre with a deep area of expression.

[Eurus]

What makes a twist/reveal "good" is always going to be controversial, but for me, a good twist is one that recontextualizes the stuff you've already seen in a way that makes it more interesting or cohesive.

Spoiler

Show

The first flashback where we find out about Helen actually executes this really well, in my opinion. It instantly shifts the meaning of the scenes of Helen smashing the puzzle box, it has you trying to remember how people reacted to her showing up, it reminds you that Blanc is a total liar when it suits him... It's a solid reveal.

The alternate perspective scenes after that are much weaker, because each reveal can mostly be summarized as "also Helen was there just out of sight, and the characters said a bunch of much more important things that were cut off the first time around". It feels like the original scene we saw the first time around is less important, because it's basically being superceded by this new one.

This wasn't a deal breaker for me, anyway, but it did make some bits of the movie drag a little.

[Peelee]

And I'll say that the Last Jedi is downright the only movie in the sequel trilogy that's worth a damn.

I wholeheartedly agree with this, but almost certainly not for the same reason as anyone else saying it.

[Murk]

As far as twists go, for a moment I was very afraid that

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the random island roommate we were told "not to mind him" would be the killer. Especially when Duke was poisoned and Blanc was like "nobody is allowed to leave!" and "Where is everyone?!" and "Who is missing?!" and everyone seemed to have forgotten there was someone else on that island, just walking around freely.

And I thought that would be a cheap, terrible twist that a pretentious writer could think was very clever: to clearly show a character, literally tell the audience to ignore him, and then laugh at them because they did.

But then he casually popped up again for a joke

and luckily it turned out not be that stupid.

[Aedilred]

Spoiler

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Oh, in general I've been a huge fan of RJ's work. And I'll say that the Last Jedi is downright the only movie in the sequel trilogy that's worth a damn.

But in Glass Onion there is a small but critical difference. See, in Knives Out, we, the audience, apparently know what happened, even if the characters don't. Which is fine, even as it is revealed that what we thought happened wasn't what actually happened. There were clues that things weren't all what they seemed, and the characters never were hiding the information from us.

In Glass Onion, Benoit knows that a murder was committed. But we don't. We the audience know less than the characters. And the movie goes out of its way to keep it that way with scenes like the Benoit spying on Duke spying on Whisky thing.

It's the difference between 'hey lets try and figure this out' vs 'show me what happened because there is no point in me trying'. The former is a lot more engaging than the latter.

Well, in Knives Out, the "true" version wasn't served up to us immediately. If I remember rightly it comes about a third of the way in, appearing to be the twist. Then there's another twist right at the end which pulls the rug, demonstrating that what we had seen needed to be recontextualised.

Glass Onion tries to do something similar, but I don't think it's nearly as effective. Firstly, the first twist comes too late, and its dramatic impact has already been diminished by an on-screen murder. Secondly, the twist takes too long to unpack, and as has been pointed out previously consists largely in showing us extended versions of scenes we've already seen. Thirdly, there isn't really a final twist. There's a solution to the problem, but from the point the second twist is exposed, the plot is pretty much linear.

It also doesn't help, I don't think, that the problem has to be solved twice: first the mystery is solved, then oh no that didn't work, then it's solved again more bluntly, but without changing the expected outcome. That adds to the pacing problems the film has, I think, because it feels like there's a lot of retreading the same ground, both figuratively and in some cases literally. And the film is, I think, too long anyway even ignoring that.

As to the method of dealing with the second twist, and the reveal that scenes have been strategically cut, I have always felt that is a rather cheap way of building suspense. It's fine to show only a certain character's perspective and cut accordingly, but that isn't what's happening. We think we're getting Blanc's perspective the first time round, but we're only getting part of it - specifically, the non-critical part.

Not that I thought the film was bad by any means, I just don't think on reflection that it measures up to the first.

[Tyndmyr]

That video is predicated on a pretty faulty premise. That the Crime Mystery isn't a sub genre in its own right, so well established that Knives Out leans heavily on the influences that solidified it as a concept in the first place. We don't even need to bring up Agatha Christie here, which Knives Out and Glass Onion are firmly touching on, because there's an entire sub genre of the sub genre called Cozies that Knives Out and Glass Onion are swimming in. Neither film shifts genres, they're firmly within a singular genre with a deep area of expression.

I'd agree with this.

The murder mystery genre is, well, very established, and many particular tropes and subgenres exist. This doesn't make any of them bad, and in fact, I quite enjoy this one when well executed, but yeah, RJ isn't quite so subversive as he likes to pretend. Almost everything has been done before, and for a genre film, knowing your niche and the expectations of it often can be part of making a great film. Solid execution counts for a ton.

Look at the recent Puss in Boots animated film. It absolutely does not redefine or subvert genres or anything like that. It is a...pretty straightforward romp. However, it is executed fantastically. The animation is beautiful, the adversary dreadful, the simple lesson the hero must learn is clearly embodied and demonstrated. It is absolutely a good movie of its type. No genre redefinition required.

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The first flashback where we find out about Helen actually executes this really well, in my opinion. It instantly shifts the meaning of the scenes of Helen smashing the puzzle box, it has you trying to remember how people reacted to her showing up, it reminds you that Blanc is a total liar when it suits him... It's a solid reveal.

The alternate perspective scenes after that are much weaker, because each reveal can mostly be summarized as "also Helen was there just out of sight, and the characters said a bunch of much more important things that were cut off the first time around". It feels like the original scene we saw the first time around is less important, because it's basically being superseded by this new one.

This wasn't a deal breaker for me, anyway, but it did make some bits of the movie drag a little.

Spoiler

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I would agree that the smashing of the puzzle box is good foreshadowing. It's the only real clue we have of the Helen swap.

That's a good example of playing fair with information, whereas the "just out of sight" is not fair. The box smashing scene is something we don't fully understand when we see it, but it does give us a small clue, and it makes sense in context.

We want to be fooled, but we also want to feel as if we could have figured it out. Ideally, both are possible, and at least some aspects are discoverable without spoiling the whole film. That makes for a satisfying, engaging experience as the watcher is both engaged, surprised, and has the satisfaction of solving puzzles. Obviously...this is not easy to do. Many murder mystery films do not play entirely fair, but its admired when they do.

[Ramza00]

That video is predicated on a pretty faulty premise. That the Crime Mystery isn't a sub genre in its own right, so well established that Knives Out leans heavily on the influences that solidified it as a concept in the first place. We don't even need to bring up Agatha Christie here, which Knives Out and Glass Onion are firmly touching on, because there's an entire sub genre of the sub genre called Cozies that Knives Out and Glass Onion are swimming in. Neither film shifts genres, they're firmly within a singular genre with a deep area of expression.

We are defining genres differently *shrug*, how the video defines genres is expectations of the concept of the plot that form a predictable pattern in the mind of the readers.

Thus when any work of fiction “does anything novel” it is challenging its genre it is placed in, and if it’s legible in another genre tradition than it switches genres. Of course no work of fiction is truly novel and ever work of fiction is also novel at the same time, it is a certain type of definition that has ambiguity at its core. Like a donut hole inside a donut whole.

What makes a twist/reveal "good" is always going to be controversial, but for me, a good twist is one that recontextualizes the stuff you've already seen in a way that makes it more interesting or cohesive.

Spoiler

Show

The first flashback where we find out about Helen actually executes this really well, in my opinion. It instantly shifts the meaning of the scenes of Helen smashing the puzzle box, it has you trying to remember how people reacted to her showing up, it reminds you that Blanc is a total liar when it suits him... It's a solid reveal.

The alternate perspective scenes after that are much weaker, because each reveal can mostly be summarized as "also Helen was there just out of sight, and the characters said a bunch of much more important things that were cut off the first time around". It feels like the original scene we saw the first time around is less important, because it's basically being superceded by this new one.

This wasn't a deal breaker for me, anyway, but it did make some bits of the movie drag a little.

100% agree and this parallels my feels. Certain reveals were more impactful, and good or bad is not how I would phrase it, instead I would use satisfactory or less satisfactory.

[Cikomyr2]

I think i will reserve judgement about if this movie is genuinely good is if i am still happy on a 2nd rewatch, in a few months. Maybe half a year.

I know i watched Knives Out about 5 times and i had a thrill each time.

[Forum Explorer]

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I would agree that the smashing of the puzzle box is good foreshadowing. It's the only real clue we have of the Helen swap.

That's a good example of playing fair with information, whereas the "just out of sight" is not fair. The box smashing scene is something we don't fully understand when we see it, but it does give us a small clue, and it makes sense in context.

We want to be fooled, but we also want to feel as if we could have figured it out. Ideally, both are possible, and at least some aspects are discoverable without spoiling the whole film. That makes for a satisfying, engaging experience as the watcher is both engaged, surprised, and has the satisfaction of solving puzzles. Obviously...this is not easy to do. Many murder mystery films do not play entirely fair, but its admired when they do.

That is exactly how I feel.