We all love a mystery. That’s the central thrill of a whodunnit, after all. Tell the audience there’s been a murder, trap a group of shifty archetypes in a room, and just keep pulling at threads until the whole thing unravels. It’s an old-fashioned genre that’s undergone something of an unlikely comeback in the past few years, with Rian Johnson’s slick, amusing 2019 puzzler Knives Out sitting among efforts like Murder on the Orient Express, Murder Mystery and See How They Run at the crest of the whodunnaissance. But Johnson knows that when it comes to some things – like the sexual identity of your main character in a buzzy new movie franchise – mystery simply won’t cut it.
Knives Out saw Daniel Craig play Benoit Blanc, a drawling southern private eye brought in to solve the murder of a wealthy crime novelist. Pastiching a long tradition of preternatural screen sleuths, from Sherlock to Columbo, Blanc (in part through Craig’s enjoyably ridiculous characterisation) nonetheless managed to establish himself as a breakout character and a worthy original creation. This week sees Blanc return in Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, a standalone sequel pitting the character against a whole new set of eccentric maybe-murderers. In the film, Blanc is shown to be living with another man (played in a cameo by a very famous movie star). At a press conference ahead of the film’s festival premiere last month, Johnson, who also wrote the script, was asked whether the character is queer. “Yes, he obviously is,” came the response.
