Knives Out.

Knives Out might as well have been made explicitly for me. I can’t remember the last time I saw a movie that fit so many things I like in movies or even literature. It’s a mystery, and a fairly clever one. It’s witty on multiple levels. It’s very fast-paced, with a sort of hyper-reality to the dialogue. It left me wanting more of the same, and never felt overstuffed. It’s an homage to my favorite genre of films and novels, but never descends to parody. It’s not quite perfect, but my god did I enjoy every minute of it.

Rian Johnson wrote and directed the film, and did a similar homage to noir mysteries with his first feature film, Brick, but without the humor of this film, which is very much a British mystery in the style of Agatha Christie’s novels. He’s assembled an incredible cast, with Daniel Craig chewing scenery all over the country manor house as the pompous ‘gentleman detective’ Benoit Blanc – so we’re not even going to be subtle about the Christie allusions – who is Hercule Poirot with an exaggerated southern drawl that another character compares accurately to Foghorn Leghorn. It’s a bit of overkill, because he wrote the film like every Poirot or Miss Marple novel where there’s a bunch of eccentric characters who get very little depth or development, but given how much these actors appear to be enjoying the ride, it’s hard not to enjoy watching them do so.

Blanc, like Poirot in most of his novels, isn’t introduced until some time has already elapsed in the story. Instead we are introduced to Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer, a delight as ever), bestselling mystery writer and, as of the opening scene in the film, recently deceased. A week later, two police officers (LaKeith Stanfield, woefully underused, and Noah Segan) arrive to question all of the family members, with Blanc sitting in the background and only interjecting after the formal questioning is over. The family members are all simply aghast at the implication that the patriarch was murdered – well, all except for his mother – and get worked up when Blanc starts probing. Enter Marta (Ana de Armas), Harlan’s private nurse, a Peruvian woman whose mother is an undocumented immigrant and who can’t lie without throwing up. Blanc uses the latter feature to his advantage, while others try to exploit the former for their own ends. Marta was the last person to see Harlan alive, and knows more about the circumstances of his death than anyone else, so Blanc appoints her his deputy (in a way) and sets about solving the crime.

Knives Out is all story and dialogue, and I’m good with that. I especially love the Poirot stories because I enjoy his character – the pompous, brilliant little Belgian man with the “face fungus” and silly hat and ability to solve crimes by the “psychology” of the suspects – and Blanc offers a lot of that too, similarly enamored of his own abilities, perhaps less perceptive when it comes to the suspects’ psychological motives but more entertaining with his turns of phrase. If you’re looking for complex characters or character growth, though, it’s not here: this is an old-school whodunit that lives and dies – pun intended – by the murder and its solution, buoyed by rapid-fire dialogue that would do His Girl Friday‘s writers proud. It is frequently funny, never riotously so, but consistently amusing, and Johnson did imbue several of the characters with varying degrees of wit, with Linda (Jamie Lee Curtis, who really inhabits her role and could carry a movie in that character) dashing off some of the best lines. So you’ll get to see a stupendous collection of actors – Michael Shannon, Don Johnson, Toni Collette, Chris Evans, Chris Evans’ sweater, even M. Emmet Walsh – get not quite enough to do, but do a lot with what they get.

The story itself is good, but I think it’s a bit too easy to solve. I suspect I know what Johnson was trying to do, but it doesn’t quite work. I wasn’t sure I knew it until the end, and even then I realized I missed one really big clue, but it’s a bit too clear from the midpoint of the film who the most likely culprit is. Johnson does dial up the resolution to eleven, though, and perhaps the greatest strength of the script is how often little lines or events from earlier in the film pay off at the end. It rewards you for paying attention, and my attention was rapt from the beginning.

Johnson has already said he’d like to do a sequel with Blanc as the lead detective solving another murder, and I’m here for it – but I acknowledge I am at the absolute center of the circle encompassing the target audience for such a film. I love an old-timey murder mystery, and Johnson gave me the best new one I’ve seen or read in a very long time. It has flaws I wouldn’t forgive in a non-genre film, but great genre fiction often adheres to the genre’s intrinsic rules. I wish I could have seen Curtis fire off a few more quips or to know how Evans character became such a spoiled disaster, or gotten more mileage from the gag about the grandson who’s an alt-right troll (and looks like someone hit Mark Gatiss with a Benjamin Button ray), but this isn’t that kind of movie. Your mileage may vary.