It’s right there in the title, then explicitly stated during the movie: “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” is a movie with layers. Layers that somehow manage to reveal and conceal in equal measure, as writer-director Rian Johnson and his cast unveil surprise after surprise.
In the film, tech billionaire Miles Bron (Edward Norton) invites a group of old friends to his private Greek island for a weekend-long murder mystery party at which he will be the victim and they will solve his (pretend) death. Among his guests — played by Kate Hudson, Kathryn Hahn, Dave Bautista, Leslie Odom Jr., Jessica Henwick and Madelyn Cline — are unexpected faces. One is world-renowned detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig, reprising his role from “Knives Out”); the other is Andi Brand (Janelle Monáe), a former partner who recently lost a contentious lawsuit against Bron.
One of the most inventive and playful aspects of the film is the way in which “Glass Onion” reveals itself to be much more than a whodunit. It also revels in the question of who gets killed. “ The mystery is not the thing that’s going to keep the audience in their seats,” Johnson explained in an interview earlier this fall. “The mystery is, in a way, set dressing and the reality is that the audience is going to experience this and the narrative sitting in their seats as a movie, and that’s how you have to make the thing tick. That’s how the machine has to actually work.
