Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery Review

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, Rian Johnson's whodunit murder mystery, the hotly anticipated follow-up to his 2019’s extraordinary Knives Out, is finally on Netflix. Compared to his 2019 smash hit  “Knives Out,” “Glass Onion” is even more entertaining to watch. Everything is bigger,  twistier, and more ambitious.

The glass onion mansion

As with onions, there are layers upon layers to unpeel until you reach the core. But what about Glass Onion?  Besides its magnificent crystal-clear surface, It’s just hollowness inside.  Glass Onion itself is a metaphor.  Who will build a mansion of glass onion, if there’s no layer inside the glass onion then what’s the point of making a glass onion? The answer is obvious, someone who’s rich and full of ego but an idiot at its core would build that mansion.

That idiot is Miles Bron（Edward Norton）, a  Silicon Valley tech billionaire who hosts getaway parties for his oldest friends every year. This time, Miles has decided to invite those friends to his private Greek island mansion to play a murder mystery game.  And the magnificent crystal-clear Glass Onion is on top of his mansion.

Amongst the visitors are Claire (Kathryn Hahn), a governor running for Senate; Lionel (Leslie Odom Jr.), an impressive scientist; streaming star Duke (Dave Bautista), a Twitch influencer who knows exactly what he’s doing when hawking “boner pills” to video gamers alongside his much younger girlfriend Whiskey (Madelyn Cline); fashion designer Birdie (Kate Hudson), a disgraced fashion guru who’s settled into the infamous of social media celebrity due to posting whatever comes into her head; and Cassandra (Janelle Monáe), another entrepreneur who the rest of the group seems surprised to see. Her decision to come back and face all these people who betrayed her is the real mystery of the movie.  While this group of friends frequently gets together for these types of getaways, there’s a new addition to this outing: Detective Benoit Blanc(Daniel Craig).

Folks may be there to play murder mystery, but Miles himself is well aware that this is not just a game. All of these old friends are controlled and basically owned by Miles. They all have strained “friendships” with Miles and they all had an actual motive to kill him. Blanc’s convinced one of them may want Miles dead.  

Glass onion is by far the most entertaining film I watched in the year 2022. Why is this movie so much fun to watch? One of the reasons is that Rian hooks the audience as if the audience is participating in solving the puzzles in the film. And Glass Onion literally starts with a sequence of solving puzzles. 

Starts with knocks on the door, all multilayered puzzle boxes are shipped to all of Mile’s old friends.  Then comes a montage of all of Mile’s friends solving the puzzle box together. It’s a 10-minute long sequence before the puzzle box is solved and an invitation to the private party for the murder mystery is the prize. Well, it’s nothing surprising but this sequence sets the tone of the film. Introducing most of the cast and at the same time making the billionaire Miles a genius (later the audience will learn he really is not). Brings the audience into Miles and his friends’ unique extravagant and looking-intelligent world.

 It’s like Rian’s unique equation for making movies, Starts with an on-edge fast cutting sequence to hook the audience to get onboard then together the audience will solve the mystery in the movie with the detective. 

His 2019 “Knives out” also starts with a very similar fast-cutting sequence of investigating all suspects for the murder that happened first thing in the movie. The audience becomes the detective as the sequence goes on interrogating all the suspects.  To start with a fast-cutting montage sequence, all people talking about the same topic is Rian’s way of setting up the movie.

I have to say, Watching Rian’s film is like you are invited to an extravagant dinner by him.  The opening sequence is just the appetizer, you enjoy it and decide that this is the dinner you want and wonder what the entrée will be like. Then comes the entrée, The main story of the murder mystery at the billionaire’s over-the-top mansion.

Not like Knives Out, which opened with a death that was investigated throughout the rest of the film,  more than half the film is spent getting to know the characters as we await a seemingly inevitable murder, Everything is built towards the direction that the billionaire is gonna get killed since all his friend has the reason to kill him and they all hate him.  but instead, we get something entirely different.  Not all the characters are who they appear to be, which forces us to constantly question who might be a villain and who might end up dead.

Then finally with half of the running time past， a murder happens, and not the way you expect. Duke dies of choking right in front of everyone. And then with the light cutting off, Duke’s gun fires, and Cassandra is killed. Then the movie switches its tone to a buddy love story, a whole sequence of b story of the alliance between Helen(Cassandra's twin sister) and Blanc. with tears on Blanc’s face when Cassandra gets shot， the audience watches the whole sequence in compassion， and we learn what happened with the two and their alliance!  This is why when rayn reveals Helen is not dead， the audience gets so happy instead of angry since being cheated by the director， the audience wants her to be alive so much since she is the only moral person in the story， well, besides the detective. Just like in “Knives out”, the poor immigrant Martha is the only moral person！

In the beginning, to get the invitation, Helen smashes the exquisite puzzle box off with a hammer, it is a metaphor. In the end, Helen destroys Miles' mansion again in the most violent way, including his famous paintings and his career, fame. Eventually leads to the defection of his friends. The Glass Onion mansion is blown to the ground with a blast. No matter how delicate the appearance, it is only a facade. Just like Miles himself,  a grand-order idiot who gets all his fortune and fame from stealing.

However, “Glass Onion” is fractionally less satisfying than “Knives Out”, whose plot is so clever and leaves more room for simmering subtext. With Glass Onion, besides its fancy and entertaining plot, the murder case itself is just not sophisticated enough. Though writer-director Rian Johnson can make the excuse that this is because the murderer, Miles himself is not clever enough.  And, even his methods of crime are so arrogant and dumb. Making it cheesy and kind of feel fabricated. 

However, you have to salute Rian Jonnson’s incredible abilities as a master storyteller. “Glass onion” is a film that evolves and moves in completely unexpected ways, as we’re just a pawn in Johnson’s chess game. He keeps us off-balance for two hours as he twists and manipulates with wily cleverness that we even forget that the murder case itself is kind of cheesy.  After all, It will be harsh to ask him to surpass the witness of his former work. “Knives out” was so clever. But still, “Glass onion” is one of the best whydunits. “Glass onion” is entertaining and so much fun to watch. It’s just brilliant.