"Knives Out" – murder is a family matter

 

A drama full intrigues, greed and betrayal are awaiting you. An innocent nurse gets dragged into a family drama and faster than expected she finds herself in a difficult situation.

The plot of the movie?

The family members of Harlan Thrombey, an 85-year-old mystery novelist, gather in his mansion to celebrate his birthday. However, the next morning Harlan´s housekeeper is about to serve him his breakfast as usual, when she finds him dead on a sofa, his throat slit.

The police assume he committed suicide until Benoit Blanc, a private detective, all of a sudden shows up after being hired by someone anonymously to investigate Harlan´s death. Anyone could have been the culprit. Every single member of the family would have had a motive because they all got cut off by their father/grandfather at his birthday since all of them were only able to reach success through their fathers support and money. After his death all of them were eyeing his fortune, but they did not know that Harlan changed his testament shortly before his death and gave everything he owned to his nurse Marta. Certainly the whole family is beyond shock after hearing this bad news.

What nobody knows is that Marta accidentally mixed up Harlan´s medication and gave him way too much morphine. After realizing it she desperately looks for the antidote, but cannot find it in her bag. Harlan has only 10 minutes left until he dies of the overdose, so to cover up Marta´s mistake and not get her into trouble, he comes up with a fake alibi for her and tells her exactly what to do before he cuts his throat to make it look like suicide.

 

Why is it an enjoyable movie?

Although the concept is nothing new: a murder happens and a detective starts investigating; the script is well thought-out, the movie entertaining and easy to watch. Even though the movie captures your attention and the characters are quite relatable, once the movie ends there´s not much left to think or reflect. Despite the fact that the movie is kind of predictable in some situations it´s still very amusing and by no means boring. The movie has what it takes to cast a spell on its audience, so that they keep questioning everyone and everything they see until the very end. “Knives Out” gets the viewers excited. Once they think they have finally figured out what happened after Harlan´s birthday party another plot twist is awaiting them, so that they can hardly wait for the real story to be revealed in the end. However, the story ends with an even greater plot twist and it turns out that Harlan would not have died at all because of Marta, actually he would have been just fine thanks to Marta´s intuition if he did not slit his own throat.

In my opinion the movie is fun and interesting to watch because you can see the situation from more than one point of view. Each family member gets interrogated separately by the detective, so as soon as someone else takes the lead in telling the story from his perspective something new gets revealed.
In addition to the amazing story-line and the excellent cinematography the movie features a cast of top-class actors, such as Daniel Craig and Chris Evans, to make the film even more engaging to its audience. Many people claim that “Knives Out” was one of the best movies released in 2019, therefore a sequel is on its way to be released in 2022 on Netflix.

 

Some hidden things you may not notice in the movie…

In Harlan´s mansion there is a portrait of him in the living room over the fireplace. A fun fact about that picture: it changes facial expression! If you look closely you can see that Harlan´s portrait is quite serious at the beginning and towards the end, after the murder is solved, he´s slightly smirking.

Another thing I noticed in the movie is that some characters are wearing glasses, which is not something special but as I´m also wearing glasses myself I know that they usually reflect what is opposite of them with certain lightning.
Especially when you see close-ups from characters with glasses you can see the reflection in their glasses very clearly, but you can´t see the cameras nor the production team who you´re supposed to see, since they are just opposite the actor. The production crew uses a special technique to cover that up. They use mattes to avoid their reflections and are able to ad different scenery instead.

  

Written by Anna Pescoller