Knives Out Movie Discussion (SPOILERS)

Started by Mandle, Mon 10/08/2020 16:19:12

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Mandle

Okay, this is just the best movie I have seen in the last year.

There are so many reasons why.

It has rocketed into my top 5 best mystery movie list which I thought was pretty invulnerable.

Now it goes:

1: Deathtrap
2: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (either version, but the Swedish version one millimeter higher)
3: Knives Out
4: Murder On The Orient Express (the original film)
5: Sleuth (the original film)

(Clue has been pushed back to 6th place, sorry Tim Curry)

Knives Out is a perfectly plotted mystery movie. There are no plotholes or flaws in character motivation. There are no silly tricks. All the cards are laid out on the table but it still takes at least a second viewing to understand what all the cards mean. Greatest fun I've had watching a movie in a long time.

Now for some spoiler talk:

Spoiler
After rewatching the movie three times I believe that the father had always planned to die that night.

He was the writer of murder mysteries and it was his 85th birthday and, as he was already receiving morphine injections every night to sleep we can assume he was a hospice patient. Nurses don't give daily morphine injections to somebody who is going to get better. He cut off every one of his bloodsucking family (and even admitted he was to some extent partially to blame for their flaws), and he insisted the nurse and he play the game of Go as their tradition went, for the last time from his perspective.

He wasn't surprised when he thought he was poisoned. I'm thinking he just thought "Oh, this is how it comes then?"

He knew one or more of the family would try to kill him that night, but he knew that the nurse was the only innocent person he could trust.

But the hint that makes me think this the most is that he left the letter to his daughter about her husband's affair. He told the husband that either he had to tell her or he, her father, would.

But he left a letter that only she would know how to read.

If he expected to be alive the next day he would have just told her himself in person. No need for the letter.

He definitely knew that he wasn't going to survive the night.
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Stupot

I’m planning to watch Knives Out this week, so I’ll be able to add something soon enough.

milkanannan

I haven’t seen it yet but will soon! If others are wondering about the title’s connection to radiohead: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2019-09-07/knives-out-radiohead-movie-rian-johnson?_amp=true

Stupot

I’ve now seen it and agree that it’s a great film. I’m already looking forward to the sequel.

The only downside is that there’s one part that my wife and I thought was pretty obvious from the moment it happened but was later presented as some big reveal like it was supposed to be a big twist.

Spoiler


The fact that the vials had already been swapped, meaning that Marta had actually given him the harmless painkiller. When Marta realised she’d made a ‘mistake’, My wife and I both nodded and said, ‘yep, they were already swapped’. And Harlan knew it too. His reaction, to come up with such a detailed plan to clear Marta, was a far cry from the rambling old geezer he’d just moments before, so he’d clearly been given the good medicine and knew it. We thought that was kind of obvious.

So when it was later revealed as some kind of big clever twist with the toxicology report, we were both a little disappointed because our minds had been trying to guess some even wilder twists.

(For example, I thought the old nana was long dead and that someone - maybe the supposedly dead husband of Joni - had been posing as the old gal for years in order to come up with a chance to kill Harlan.)

I was surprised by one aspect of the reveal though: The fact that Marta herself had noticed the bottles had been swapped and had deliberately switched them again to save his life “because she’s kind”.

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Mandle

Quote from: Stupot on Thu 13/08/2020 15:32:25
Spoiler

I was surprised by one aspect of the reveal though: The fact that Marta herself had noticed the bottles had been swapped and had deliberately switched them again to save his life “because she’s kind”.
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Spoiler
He didn't say "Because you're kind."
He said "Because you are a good nurse."
Also, Marta hadn't deliberately switched the bottles, she did it subconsciously, just like she did one more time at the end, but I think you may have just misspoken on that point.

I didn't see the twist coming because I watched this movie with no idea what kind of movie it was going to be. I can see it might be easier to guess if you had heard "The movie has great twists!" from somewhere first. I always try to avoid telling people when a movie has "twists" because I think that's almost as bad as just telling them the twist.

I thought the best "twist" was the structure of the movie itself. I've never seen a whodunnit movie where they show exactly what happened like 40 minutes into the film, and it's not misleading at all. Rian Johnson was so clever to show us that these were the actual memories of Marta, during the coin flip, instead of them being her testimony or something where we would doubt the accuracy. We know right from that moment that this is exactly what actually happened.

I remember thinking "Is this gonna be a really short movie?!"
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Laura Hunt

(Not using spoiler tags because this whole thread is a huge spoiler, and anybody who clicks on a topic titled "Knives Out Movie Discussion (SPOILERS)" and then complains about spoilers deserves everything that's coming to them :P)

I liked it a lot, but I was never sure until the end if her memories were the actual truth or if there was something else hidden between the lines (maybe she had misremembered stuff, or she thought something was A when it was actually B when seen through the eyes of somebody else). I also thought that it was pretty obvious that Ransom was the one behind the switcheroo and I felt that the movie lost a bit of focus when the plot moved outside of the mansion. But overall, I had a great time and wouldn't say no to a second viewing. I also highly recommend his first movie "Brick" to anybody who hasn't watched it!

Crimson Wizard

#6
The structure of the story is definitely interesting, it's a murder/suicide wrapped into a murder/attempt, like a donut inside a donut ( :=), and this time viewer knows about central part early. To theoretize further, we know what happened, but we do not know (or have false knowledge) of how it came to that.

Laura Hunt

I know there's more movies where we start off knowing what happened and the point is to find out how, but I can't for the life of me remember any right now. Arrrrrgh, so frustrating. Can anybody think of any examples?

Crimson Wizard

#8
Quote from: Laura Hunt on Fri 14/08/2020 11:01:51
I know there's more movies where we start off knowing what happened and the point is to find out how, but I can't for the life of me remember any right now. Arrrrrgh, so frustrating. Can anybody think of any examples?

Depends on what do you mean by "what happened". Like, we know full story of what happened, who did and what etc?

There was "Memento", where you see the story forwards and backwards until it meets somewhere in the middle.

Laura Hunt

I mean it in quite the literal sense. For example, we see a funeral at the start of the movie and then the whole movie is basically a flashback leading to that moment. Or people celebrating something and then we're told what it is that happened, stuff like that. Basically the "yep, that's me. You're probably wondering how I ended up in this situation" trope.

Crimson Wizard

Quote from: Laura Hunt on Fri 14/08/2020 11:09:11
I mean it in quite the literal sense. For example, we see a funeral at the start of the movie and then the whole movie is basically a flashback leading to that moment. Or people celebrating something and then we're told what it is that happened, stuff like that. Basically the "yep, that's me. You're probably wondering how I ended up in this situation" trope.

Martin Scorsese's "Casino" comes first to my mind, but there have to be alot of these.

Stupot

My wife came up with the point that it must have been Ransom whodunnit, purely because of how expensive it probably was to have him in the movie in the first place. He’s barely in shot for more than a few seconds in the first part of the film that you almost forget it’s Captain America. He was surely always going to have some major part in the Endgame (pun intended), which kind of made him a pretty strong contender for whodunnit.

Mandle

Quote from: Stupot on Fri 14/08/2020 12:35:27
My wife came up with the point that it must have been Ransom whodunnit, purely because of how expensive it probably was to have him in the movie in the first place. He’s barely in shot for more than a few seconds in the first part of the film that you almost forget it’s Captain America. He was surely always going to have some major part in the Endgame (pun intended), which kind of made him a pretty strong contender for whodunnit.


He actually had me convinced at one point that he was going to turn out to be the only good person in the shitty family of scumbags. I think that may have been a motivation of the director to have hired someone we are used to seeing as such a high-moral-values character.

LimpingFish

Quote from: Laura Hunt on Fri 14/08/2020 11:09:11
For example, we see a funeral at the start of the movie and then the whole movie is basically a flashback leading to that moment. Or people celebrating something and then we're told what it is that happened, stuff like that. Basically the "yep, that's me. You're probably wondering how I ended up in this situation" trope.

Sunset Boulevard is one.

And a lot of film noir and neo-noir is structured like that (Double Indemnity, for instance).
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Stupot

#14
They really went to pains with this film to show that Marta was good. The whole not being able to lie thing was a bit gimmicky I thought, but probably necessary if you really want the audience to trust her side of the story. Everyone else clearly had reasons to lie, but Marta apparently couldn’t even lie if she wanted to.

But what if she can lie? If it hadn’t been for Ransom’s confession in the final scenes, I might actually suggest that the whole can’t lie thing was a massive long-con and she’d been working her way into Harlan’s affections all this time. She said all along that she wasn’t playing the game like the rest of the family, but what if she was all along? When she’s standing there on the balcony with her ‘my house’ mug, she looks like someone who has just won.

It’s much more believable that someone might have the gift of being about to throw up when they want to, rather than the curse of throwing up when they lie.

I wonder if they filmed alternate endings. They would be fun to watch.






Mandle

Quote from: Stupot on Sat 15/08/2020 03:26:47
It’s much more believable that someone might have the gift of being about to throw up when they want to, rather than the curse of throwing up when they lie.

She wouldn't have done it when out of view like when she rushed to the toilet after the interrogation and when she threw up in Blanc's drink cup in the car... Or.... Hmmmm....

The cup scene was masterful at the end. Nothing else needed to tell us her decision.

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