Glass Onion

2022, d. Rian Johnson - Netflix

The key to a good murder mystery is (he says, having not been overly steeped in the genre throughout his life) not the mystery itself, but the players involved and the situation they're involved in.  Most mysteries (not just the murderous ones) worth their salt aren't of the "whodunnit" sort where the audience is given the clues to figure out the perpetrator.  That's actually the worst type of mystery because you don't want the audience to figure it out before the film reveals it.  In fact, if you lay out clues too heavy-handedly, the audience will spend more time trying to puzzle out the answer than paying attention to the story, and that's death for any storyteller.

Look at a movie like 1984's Clue that infamously was send out to theatres with three different endings.  This meant that the details within the film were presented in such a way that three different endings (at least), with three different murderers (at least) could exist.  Glass Onion, like its predecessor, Knives Out, is not so openly constructed.  The seeds of the film's resolution are laid throughout the entire production, but they're also only part of the story.

Glass Onion finds a billionaire tech mogul (I was going to write "genius" but we're all learning that these tech moguls aren't exactly geniuses) inviting his old friends out to his luxurious island estate for a weekend murder mystery party.  Also invited was the partner he screwed out of the company, and, on accident (or by someone's design), world renowned cajun detective Benoit Blanc.  The opening set-up is perhaps overlong, but its playfulness means it's far from dull.  Before the team hit the island, there's a heavy COVID-times vibe, with masks and stranger wariness that threatens to overshadow the film, but is quickly dispensed with with the wave of an aerosol can (the rich have solutions to problems the rest of us don't have access to).

The murder mystery party is a bust (Benoit Blanc is just too good), and so the party just becomes a party, but unspoken tensions fill the room.  Then the manosphere bro of the group collapses on the floor, the lights go out, and gunshots explode.  Things get serious from there.  As they do, the danger looms and the suspicions spiral out and it comes to a head with another death at the end of the very extended first act.  

In an average film at this point we would be pausing to contemplate, the who, the how, the why.  But Johnson instead takes us back to the beginning and offers us another perspective, additional insights we weren't privy to before, and deceptions that he, as a filmmaker, intentionally let us believe.  And once he unveils all this new information...we're still no better off, no clearer on the who and the why.

And so, the third act...where everyone is gathered together and the great detective lays it all out...but there's no police, no one's coming, and to say anymore would be telling...but it's a very elaborate Rube Goldberg machine Johnson sets up, and once the domino is tipped, it moves rapidly and expands and expands, using all the pieces laid down in a very exciting and satisfying conclusion.

You wouldn't think a murder mystery would be an EVENT film, but that's the scale this operates on, and succeeds at doing so.  It's also not just a trifle.  It has things to say about the people involved in the story, and their real world counterparts, in fact the story entirely hinges upon it.  I've always appreciated how Johnson negotiates both characters and story in his features, he operates on multiple levels, and an audience can choose to accept (or reject) his films at any of those tiers.

It's clear the cast were having a blast in making this, and Daniel Craig especially loves being Benoit Blanc.  That's a good thing since Johnson has at least one more of these owed to Netflix.  I'd take a half dozen or more.