Miles calls himself a disruptor. To him, there is no higher compliment, no greater aspiration than upending the status quo. He explains the term “disruptor” to Benoit Blanc, the chicken-fried detective from Knives Out, who listens with curiosity and disguised contempt. Miles is full of shit, of course, and Benoit knows it. So does Rian Johnson, the writer and director of the new Benoit Blanc mystery Glass Onion, who accidentally lucks into added relevance because Miles is a not-so-subtle stand-in for Elon Musk. Even if the world’s most obnoxious idiot man-baby billionaire didn’t run a social network into the ground, Johnson’s follow-up is an improvement over his original whodunit. Glass Onion is wildly entertaining, briskly-paced and packed to the brim with twists. I can’t remember the last time I had so much fun at the movies.
Johnson was clearly inspired by The Last of Sheila, a thriller from the 1970s written by Anthony Perkins and Stephen Sondheim (one of his rare non-musical efforts). That film follows a group of friends and a murderer on a Greek island, as does Glass Onion. Edward Norton plays Miles, who owns the whole island, and he gathers his buddies there for a murder mystery game. They include a politician (Kathryn Hahn), a scientist (Leslie Odom Jr.), a fashion designer (Kate Hudson) and a Joe Rogan-style podcaster (Dave Bautista). Everyone is happy to see each other, although there are two unexpected guests: Miles’ former partner Andi (Janelle Monáe), who had an acrimonious split from her pals, and Benoit, who’s not even sure why he was invited. Their weekend gets underway, with Miles announcing he’ll be “killed” and his friends must solve the mystery, except – wouldn’t you know – an actual corpse appears.
It is almost impossible to spoil Glass Onion because of Johnson’s ingenious plotting, which is both dense and easy to follow. Needless to say, Johnson hides clues in plain sight, and everything we see gets shown in several contexts, leading to surprises, subtext and multiple meanings. Miles’ house has many strange features, such as hourly chime composed by Philip Glass or an absurd security system for priceless art, leading Johnson to interpret “Chekhov’s gun” in about a dozen different ways. In fact, you may want to see the film twice just so you can better understand how elegantly Johnson strung everything together.
Even more impressive is how the film’s comedic aspects dovetail nicely with its deeper themes. Johnson is not shy about his point of view, critiquing aspects of modern life that he finds particularly vulgar. At first, it seems like he is taking the piss in a specific way, as the film is set in May 2020 and there are many jokes about the pandemic or wearing masks. But as the film continues and we have a better sense of his true protagonist, who I will not reveal, his bigger target is a class of people who mistakenly think their obscene wealth also makes them smart. Benoit sees right through them, and crucially keeps that to himself.
Once all the guests arrive at Miles’ island, Johnson keeps the plot moving and throws in one surprise after another. Some of the surprises are subversive, like how Benoit casually solves a mini-mystery long before he’s supposed to, and others come out of nowhere. Glass Onion has multiple cameos from treasured actors and celebrities, firmly establishing the film’s world in our shared present, and creating gags that can happen so fast that you might miss them by blinking. Still, it is Craig’s performance as Benoit that anchors the mystery. He is in more of the film than Knives Out, and the details we learn from his personal life deepen our sense of his observational skill or morality. Craig has a ball with the character, as he’s still full of eccentricities and speaks with his absurd Kentucky accent. The infectious pleasure of his performance is crucial to the film’s effect because there are long stretches where we are unsure whether Johnson will be able to connect the dots (he does).
Throughout his career, Johnson has been a shrewd genre filmmaker. He can sometimes be a little too cute, as with The Brothers Bloom, but in films like Brick or even The Last Jedi he has shown his work, which is to say he understands not just the “how” of genre thrills but also the “why.” Still, not until Glass Onion has he a made a film so deeply satisfying, a career-best that could serve as a rejoinder to the tired adage about not making films like they used to. Within the murder mystery framework, Johnson has done more than find an elegant solution that plays fair with his audience. Scenes are satisfying on their own terms, often creating independent loops of suspense, all building toward a whole that’s both inexorable and surprising.
One final observation: Glass Onion will only be in theaters for one week, before premiering on Netflix in late December. This is a fundamental miscalculation, with the streaming service practically leaving money on the table. Anyone who sees this film will immediately rush to tell their friends how much fun they had, to the point where a more traditional theatrical would have been a better way to release the film. It is a shame because, not since maybe Get Out five years ago, has a film so expertly “played” a crowd to a palpable, shared sense of joy.
Photo courtesy of Netflix
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