"Funny thing about whodunits: they don't necessarily have a lot of meat on the bone. Yes, their twists often lead us through the kind of mental exercise we could never solve alone, but for the most part, the genre indulges in smoke and mirrors. There's the illusion of substance, of colorful personality, on the surface - but the act of untangling the thread is often more satisfying than the answers we eventually get."
"The films themselves have delivered one brilliant murder mystery after the next, providing Johnson with a platform to tackle any issue on his mind - from far-right trolls and vacuous billionaires to the "Fandom Menace" that tore his divisive Star Wars project, The Last Jedi, to ribbons. Thanks to the filmmaker's crackling, jaunty scripts, packed with the kind of joke-a-minute dialogue most can only dream of writing, the Knives Out saga became an unprecedented delight, with Johnson stepping up as our generation's own Agatha Christie."
Whodunits often focus on clever misdirection and mental puzzles more than thematic depth. Rian Johnson's Knives Out films combine intricate mysteries with rapid-fire, witty dialogue, allowing the filmmaker to lampoon targets ranging from far-right trolls and vacuous billionaires to toxic fandom. Glass Onion offered flashy satire but felt superficially moralistic. Wake Up Dead Man returns to a moodier, gothic tone and confronts religious nationalism directly, presenting the darkest, most ideologically charged entry yet. The film shifts from luxurious island spectacle to somber atmosphere while attempting to marry genre pleasures with sharper political critique and moral urgency.
Read at Inverse
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]