Rian Johnson’s homage to Agatha Christie delivers laughs, twists and thrills with aplomb
Describing his thrillingly playful attitude toward genre cinema, writer/director Rian Johnson once told me that he loved the “slightly meta conversation it opens between you and the viewer” – the way that a shared set of ground rules can be assumed and then subverted. That’s been a feature of Johnson’s career since his low-budget debut feature, Brick (2005), transposed a dark, 1940s noir narrative to the sunny environs of a modern
California high school, with attention-grabbing results. In 2012’s Looper, he turned a time-travel adventure into a bleak meditation upon the consequences of solving problems through violence. More recently, his 2017
Star Wars movie, The Last Jedi, outraged some hardcore fans who didn’t think the series’ ever-evolving mythology should be up for discussion.
In the deliciously entertaining Knives Out, Johnson goes back to his roots with an updated homage to the Agatha Christie whodunnits he loved as a child, and to those “cheekily self-aware” screen adaptations in which Peter Ustinov would lead an all-star cast through a labyrinthine murder mystery.