Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery Is a Multilayered Delight
Rian Johnson believes what we all suspect to be a universal truth: the world is run by idiots. How better to demonstrate the utter absurdity of our lot as a society than to assemble a motley crew of characters who enjoy an inordinate, arguably undeserved, share of power, wealth, popularity, or a cocktail of all three, and put them all on a billionaire’s private island for some fun, games, and murder?
The first of two Knives Out sequels optioned by Netflix, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery further fleshes out Detective Benoit Blanc’s (Daniel Craig) world one absurd chapter at a time. Blanc is Johnson’s Hercule Poirot, a gentleman detective for an age with fewer and fewer gentlemen and increasingly more scoundrels. When Blanc finds himself on an island amongst them, it’s the perfect set-up for another murder mystery.
Glass Onion is a differently flavored story from the first Knives Out, leaning heavily into the ludicrousness afforded by a world where reality has become indistinguishable from satire. We live in a time where the elite burn their millions sending rockets into space as some form of dick-measuring contest, so an egoist one percenter like Miles Bron (Edward Norton), who has a literal giant glass onion building sprouting in the middle of his private island, is actually believable.
When Bron invites his close-knit group of friends—with a fantastical puzzle box—to a weekend getaway, it’s basically billionaire game night. Blanc shows up with an invite, too, much to Bron’s surprise, and just like an uninvited guest who happens to be very, very, very good at board games, ruins the fun for everybody. But Blanc ruining everybody else’s fun only means more fun for the audience as he picks apart each guest’s character and peels away their layers like, well, onions.
Glass Onion is a differently flavored story from the first Knives Out, leaning heavily into the ludicrousness afforded by a world where reality has become indistinguishable from satire.
It was always Johnson’s intent to tell more Benoit Blanc stories the same way Agatha Christie spun out Poirot mysteries, “if (the first movie) does even moderately well, it’d be really fun to keep making these. But the mode in which we were thinking to keep making them was always not to continue the story of the first one, but to treat them the way Agatha Christie treated her books and to do an entirely new mystery every time, a new location, new rogues gallery of characters.”
Bron’s posse includes heavy hitters like Claire Debella (Kathryn Hahn), the governor of Connecticut who’s gunning for a Senate seat; Birdie Jay (Kate Hudson), a former supermodel turned fashion designer; Duke Cody (Dave Bautista), a gun-toting, right-wing streamer and poster child for the Men’s Rights Movement; Lionel Toussaint (Leslie Odom, Jr.), the head scientist in charge of Bron’s flagship project; and Cassandra Brand (Janelle Monáe), Bron’s former business partner and co-founder of his company. Each one is a distillation of and walking commentary on each of society’s archetypal personas.
“And also something Agatha Christie did,” Johnson points out. “Anyone who knows her work, she really shook it up book to book. It’s not just a change of whodunit. She was mixing genres. She was throwing crazy narrative spins that had never been done in whodunits before. She was really keeping the audience on their toes.”
Johnson tries, and largely succeeds, in mixing it up the second time around. Glass Onion is an upward-punching, comedic mystery with a practical idiot savant who seemingly upends everyone’s plans cluelessly while picking up actual clues. Benoit Blanc, the Knives Out-verse’s greatest detective who had been marinating in frustration from the lack of high-profile murders to solve thanks to COVID-19, demonstrates his glee at finally getting to solve a mystery by unraveling Bron’s meticulously-planned weekend in the first few minutes and hilariously asks if he wins something, like an iPad. That’s Benoit Blanc in a nutshell.
There’s a little bit of prescience in the way Miles Bron comes off as very Elon Musk. Caricature isn’t even the right term anymore as Musk’s antics since his takeover of Twitter has revealed his, how to put it, deficit of genius. But Edward Norton insists Miles isn’t based on anyone in particular, “Rian and I have been talking about this a lot, the list of people it could be grows longer every day. And even some of the ones we might not have thought were candidates have proved themselves to be just in recent weeks.”
“I said to Rian I think that it's sort of like Carly Simon's song, ‘You're so vain, you'll probably think this song is about you.’ I think that there are a lot of tech illuminati who probably will and should think that it's in reference to them. Men and women.”
That someone as outlandish as Miles Bron seems believable at all is a reflection of the absurdity of our times. In fact, everyone in his inner circle is as outlandish and just as believable. The testosterone-fueled Cody is a parody of every toxic male who capitalizes on and monetizes fragile masculinity, the tragedy being that the character is closer to being biographical than fictional in our reality.
Everyone is ridiculous yet familiar, revealing truths we already know as Johnson peels back the layers of the mystery. But he makes sure to supplant our discomfort with humor. These are the idiots who rule the world, but they’re served to us with some karmic seasoning a side of schadenfreude.
There’s also an abundance of entertaining and blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameos, not least of whom is Blanc’s live-in partner, a quick and passing nod to his sexuality. Craig shrugs off the last vestiges of Bond’s hypermasculinity and embraces Blanc’s subtle flamboyance.
These are the idiots who rule the world, but they’re served to us with some karmic seasoning a side of schadenfreude.
John Lennon wrote “Glass Onion,” a Side One inclusion among the White Album’s thirty tracks, with nonsensical lyrics as a cheeky response to critics and fans who’d read too much into the lyrics of Beatles songs. Johnson employs nonsensicality with a little more purpose but with just as much cheekiness: the world is absurd and we aren’t meant to make sense of it.
When Johnson takes a Banksy-like approach to what is arguably the world’s greatest painting in the film’s climax, it’s painful but ultimately cathartic to watch. It’s this sense of satisfaction and shameless social conscience that elevates Glass Onion over its predecessor. We can’t quite eat the rich, but we can make fun of them all we want.
