The success of Knives Out offers a chance to settle back and revisit whodunnits imbued with the spirit of Agatha Christie
You have to hand it to Rian Johnson. To go from directing a
Star Wars franchise entry to trying out a genre widely perceived as having had its heyday in the 1930s is the kind of risk more blockbuster directors should take. Better yet, it paid off: with more than £260m in the bank, Knives Out proved that there’s life yet in the dusty old country-house mystery. Naturally, a sequel has already been greenlit.
The film, available on streaming and DVD this week, is lively, limber entertainment for a quarantined night in. The spirit of Agatha Christie is strong in this jazzy old-school whodunnit revolving around a dead mystery writer, his bewildered Latina nurse and his money-grubbing family – all investigated by Daniel Craig’s peculiarly southern-fried gumshoe – though its modern twist of Trump-era class politics finds fresh crannies of meaning in its classic family mansion location.