Knives Out

• 1. Introduction

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  Knives Out, the 2019 mystery written and directed by Rian Johnson, builds its plot around a nurse named Marta Cabrera who cannot lie without vomiting. Every police question and every chat with a suspect becomes a danger for her. Around her gathers an ensemble of eleven actors, drawn together by the death of a bestselling author played by Christopher Plummer. Daniel Craig arrives as Benoit Blanc, a famed private detective who will not accept that the death was a suicide. This documentary follows the questions behind the film. Why would a director return to a genre that studios thought was out of date? How do you fill a house with stars around a lead who is relatively unknown? How do you build a murder mansion when the script barely describes one? And what is a playful whodunit really saying about money, family and who gets to keep the house?

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• 2. The Thrombey Case

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  Fran, the housekeeper, finds the wealthy novelist Harlan Thrombey dead the morning after his birthday party, his throat cut. Lieutenant Elliot and Trooper Wagner believe he took his own life. Someone anonymously hires the private detective Benoit Blanc, and he soon learns that Harlan's relationships with his relatives were strained. Several of them had a believable reason to want him gone.

  Blanc does not know what Marta knows. She believes she gave Harlan a lethal dose of morphine after mixing up his bedtime medications. Harlan told her to protect herself with an alibi. She was to be seen leaving the house, sneak back in through a window, and pose as Harlan so that he seemed alive after she had gone. Only then did he cut his own throat. Because Marta's honesty is physical, she answers questions with true but incomplete statements, and she hides the evidence that points at her.

  At the reading of the will, the Thrombeys learn that Marta inherits the entire fortune and property. Harlan's grandson Ransom Drysdale helps her escape, then tricks her into confessing to him. He offers more help in return for a share of the money. The rest of the family tries to pressure her into giving up the inheritance. They even threaten to have her undocumented mother deported.

  A blackmail note arrives with part of a photocopied toxicology report. Marta and Ransom drive to the medical examiner's office and find it burned down. An email then proposes a meeting with the blackmailer, but Blanc and the police spot the pair, and Ransom is arrested. At the meeting place, Marta finds Fran, the blackmailer, drugged. She gives Fran CPR and calls an ambulance. Marta confesses to Blanc, only to learn that Ransom has already pointed the finger at her. She decides she must also confess to the family, which would void her inheritance under the slayer rule.

  Back at the mansion, Marta finds Fran's copy of the full report. It shows only trace amounts of morphine in Harlan's blood. Blanc lays out his reasoning for the police, Marta and Ransom. Harlan had told Ransom about the will, and Ransom swapped the medicines so that Marta would kill Harlan without knowing it. But Marta recognized the correct drug by its thickness, as an experienced nurse would, and never read the label. She only thought she had poisoned him after seeing the label on the bottle Ransom had filled with something else. When the death was reported as a suicide, Ransom anonymously hired Blanc to trap her. Fran had seen Ransom removing the switched bottles from the scene and sent him the blackmail note. Ransom believed Marta guilty even after realizing she was not. So he forwarded the note to her, burned the examiner's office to destroy proof of her innocence, and overdosed Fran, hoping Marta would be found beside the body.

  The trap closes when the hospital calls. Marta tells Ransom that Fran survived and will name him. He insists he is safe, since his attempt failed. Marta then vomits on him, which shows that she lied and that Fran is dead. Police officers have recorded his confession. Ransom seizes a knife from Harlan's collection and lunges at her, but it is a retractable stage knife, and he is arrested on the spot.

  Blanc admits he suspected Marta of some part in the death from the start, because of a drop of blood on her shoe. He tells her she prevailed because her ethical choices kept blocking Ransom's schemes. The family waits outside in defeat. Marta watches from a balcony of what is now her mansion, sipping from one of Harlan's mugs, which claims the house, the rules and the coffee for its owner.

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• 3. Reviving the Whodunit

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  In 2005, Rian Johnson finished Brick, a low-budget thriller and his first feature, and the idea for Knives Out began to form. Its seed was his childhood fondness for film versions of Agatha Christie's detective stories. For guidance on plotting, he turned to Alfred Hitchcock, who believed that traditional whodunits leaned too hard on formulaic suspense, above all a climactic twist. Johnson responded by designing a framework of tonal shifts meant to build tension. He later named his biggest challenge as modernizing a genre that studios judged too antiquated to release.

  The release of Looper in 2012 left Johnson planning to write Knives Out next. Instead, Lucasfilm hired him to direct Star Wars: The Last Jedi in 2017, and the project was put aside. He watched an intense culture war backlash to that film, and the experience became a further source of inspiration. He began writing in January 2018, straight after the press tour, and finished in six to seven months, depending on the account. When he showed a completed draft to friends, their reaction was cynical, because they did not understand why he wanted to make it.

  The title comes from a Radiohead song, which Johnson thought fit a murder mystery. The patriarch's name came from a 1981 Choose Your Own Adventure whodunit called Who Killed Harlowe Thrombey?

  Press accounts of the money disagree. A report circulated by Deadline said that MRC won the script at an auction hosted by Creative Artists Agency and FilmNation, held for investors at the 43rd Toronto International Film Festival. Producer Ram Bergman, Johnson's longtime collaborator, disputes this. He says there was no auction and that MRC was always the intended financier, thanks to its record with mass-market films by auteurs, meaning directors with real control over their projects. MRC covered the $40 million budget and agreed to generous back-end pay for Bergman, Johnson and Daniel Craig. Lionsgate, which was trying to recover from a year of mediocre box office, bought a partial share of the distribution rights.

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• 4. Assembling the Ensemble

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  Established stars were among Johnson's first demands. He looked to the Christie films starring Peter Ustinov, such as Death on the Nile in 1978 and Evil Under the Sun in 1982, because he admired their sense of spectacle. The filmmakers focused on actors who were free during the six weeks before shooting began. They wanted performers who could stand out in small speaking parts and play broad comedy without tipping into caricature. Most of the cast signed in October and November 2018. Johnson named every character after a musician whose work he liked, among them Joni Mitchell, Richard Thompson and Donald Fagen of Steely Dan, since the habit was easy to remember.

  Daniel Craig first caught Johnson's eye through stage work and film roles outside the James Bond series. Craig turned the offer down at first because of his Bond commitment to No Time to Die in 2021. Then logistical and creative disputes pushed that film back by three months, and he had time. Once he read the script, its tone and humor won him over. Blanc, however, was a struggle for Johnson. His first concept was a Hercule Poirot copy made of nothing but quirks. He reshaped the detective as a slightly pompous man with a flamboyant Southern accent and leaned on Craig's feedback. Craig worked with a dialect coach for two to three hours a day. He studied interview footage of the playwright Tennessee Williams and the author Shelby Foote, drawn from C-SPAN and Ken Burns's series The Civil War from 1990.

  Casting director Mary Vernieu handled the role of Marta Cabrera, and no name was favored from the start. Johnson wanted a relatively unknown actor with an underdog quality. Ana de Armas came up in discussions, though Johnson knew her only from Blade Runner 2049 in 2017. He liked her work but feared she was too beautiful for the part. At her audition he noticed how well she conveyed feeling, saying: "She's got that Audrey Hepburn-type thing, where her eyes just bring you in, and you're instantly on her side, and that's what we needed for the character". De Armas nearly refused because the first character description seemed clichéd. The full script changed her mind, since it stressed resilience, and Marta's immigrant background spoke to her.

  For Ransom Drysdale, Johnson pictured Chris Evans after seeing him in the 2018 Broadway revival of Lobby Hero, where he played a contemptible villain. Evans was best known as Steve Rogers, Captain America, in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Johnson wanted to use that likable image against the audience, saying: "You've got to see it not as baggage, but as ammunition. If there was someone in that part who the audience inherently wanted to like, that would help the arc overall". Evans planned a break after Avengers: Endgame in 2019, but he reconsidered when producers said the shoot would be near his home in Massachusetts.

  The rest of the family brought their own approaches. Toni Collette's main aim as Joni was to find the humor in her. Christopher Plummer, in one of his last film appearances before his death in 2021, called Harlan "stern, bright and rough-hewn" with a crass sense of humor. Michael Shannon never auditioned as Walt and was hired after a lunch arranged with Johnson. Jamie Lee Curtis saw her own life in Linda, a woman harshly judged for her privilege. As the daughter of someone famous, Curtis said, she knew how people reduce a creative career to advantages. To prepare for playing a matriarch, she spent time cooking meals.

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• 5. Mansions, Lenses and Score

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  Production began on the 30th of October 2018 in Maynard, Massachusetts, under the working title Morning Bell. The first shoot required the crew to convert vacant retail space into a laundromat. The main house is two homes in suburban Boston. A private nineteenth-century Gothic Revival manor supplied the exteriors. Most interiors were shot in Ames Mansion, a 20-room landmark in Borderland State Park in Easton, chosen partly because its original architecture was well preserved. Johnson had pointed the scouts toward the thriller Sleuth from 1972 as a visual reference.

  Neither house had enough room upstairs for Harlan's office. Production designer David Crank built that set, along with an adjoining hallway, on soundstages. He worked closely with Johnson so that the movement of characters would match the real rooms and the built ones. Other locations included Natick, Lincoln, Canton, Wellesley, Waltham and Medfield. A state-owned building in Marlborough, picked because it is round, stood in for the burned medical examiner's office. That scene used pyrotechnics, and local firefighters appeared as extras. Filming took about 38 days and ended on the 20th of December 2018. The state of Massachusetts granted a $10 million transferable tax credit on spending inside its borders.

  The script said little about the house, so Crank, Johnson and set decorator David Schlesinger shaped it through talks about look and feel. They gathered props from businesses, souvenir collectors and ordinary people in Boston and New York. For the knick-knacks, Schlesinger drew on the imaginary books Harlan had written. The chief artifacts were automata, mechanical figures that imitate human gestures. They were costly, fragile and rare. The Morris Museum's Murtogh D. Guinness Collection in Morristown, New Jersey, one of the world's largest automata exhibits, refused all uses outside exhibition. It pointed Schlesinger toward a local restorer with a private collection, and another local collector was hired to move and install the pieces. Dollhouses, crime scene dioramas, a library of books and a stash clock filled out the background.

  The hardest prop was the Wheel of Knives, a throne chair set before a ringed display of blades. It was imagined as a library piece, but the script never explained its link to the story. Crank said that finding a reason took a long process. The art department dropped its early ideas until it hit on a design with an armature and a chain to hang the display.

  Steve Yedlin, the cinematographer, was making his fifth film with Johnson. The two storyboarded their compositions, and two camera operators worked at once. Yedlin shot in the standard 1.85:1 shape on Alexa Mini cameras with Zeiss Master Prime lenses. Wide-angle shots showed the characters inside their surroundings. Panavision zoom lenses supplied the zooming that is customary in Johnson's films, and the camera style borrowed from Robert Altman, with whip pans, zooms and dolly moves. Yedlin also built a custom color-grading method with FotoKem, based on his study of photochemistry, adjusting halation, gate weave and film grain. For interiors he used overhead Arri SkyPanels and custom LED strips wrapped in foam sheets, and he measured sunlight with a spectrometer.

  Nathan Johnson, Rian's cousin, composed the score. Rian had pitched him the film as early as 2009. They wanted an abrasive classical sound, inspired by their favorite symphonic film scores, including Death on the Nile from 1978, Lawrence of Arabia from 1962 and the work of Bernard Herrmann. Nathan recorded with an orchestra at Abbey Road Studios in London. He visited the set during shooting, which is unusual, since composers normally start after filming ends. His opening string-quartet theme was his first contribution and inspired the album. It was also his first large-scale orchestral score, after experience only with small ensembles. Cut Narrative Records released the soundtrack alongside the film's theatrical launch.

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• 6. Class and Structure

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  Knives Out ranks beside Ready or Not, Parasite, Hustlers and Joker, all from 2019, as a film with class warfare at its center. Viewers and critics have also read it as a study of wealth inequality, immigration and race in contemporary America. Johnson says the story neither condemns nor endorses a single ideology and was designed to make every viewer think. He considers whodunits well suited to examining institutional power, a belief shaped by Christie, whom he sees as an apolitical woman closely attuned to British society.

  In the class reading, Marta emerges as the hero because of her humanity. She is distraught from the moment Harlan dies, while the surviving Thrombeys are split by greed over his publishing fortune. They feel entitled to control the money and grab it by any means. On this view, the family, not the hidden culprit, are the true villains. Marta resists their pressure with her wit and moral convictions. The film keeps shifting to her point of view, which Joe Berkowitz of Fast Company credits with creating its class consciousness. Professor Eugene Nulman reads the clashes between the characters as an allegorical critique of capitalism.

  The race reading focuses on a critique of white supremacy and liberal paternalism. The Thrombeys treat Marta with condescending affection, and running jokes poke at her country of origin. Michael Blouin, in an essay for White Supremacy and the American Media, disputes how far the film goes. He argues that it settles into Jeffersonian ideals of liberal universalism, pragmatic reasoning and an inborn sense of justice, which support racialized assumptions. As a result, in his words, it ends up "depoliticizing a crisis that has so far proven to be resistant to the ideal prescribed by many white liberals".

  Structure carries just as much of the tension. The film opens as a traditional whodunit, then breaks the form with two tonal shifts. The first turns it into a thriller by putting Marta's own role in Harlan's death at the center, which casts Blanc as the antagonist. In the second shift, her innocence becomes absolutely clear. That posed a real writing problem. Johnson wanted a sympathetic heroine whose behavior felt justified, and he wanted to show how far an innocent person might go when facing prison.

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• 7. Premiere and Marketing

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  The 44th Toronto International Film Festival hosted the premiere on the 7th of September 2019, as part of its special presentations. The film then closed the 14th Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas, and wrapped its North American festival run as the Centerpiece of the Chicago International Film Festival. In Europe it played as a gala entry at the 63rd BFI London Film Festival, held from the 2nd to the 13th of October 2019.

  Lionsgate ran the advertising and started in April 2019 with a preview and first teaser trailer at CinemaCon. A trade-show exhibit followed at CineEurope that June. Social media was central. Early efforts stressed feel-good messaging, campy humor and fake Thrombey family businesses, with Shannon, Collette and Curtis appearing in character in parody videos and mock ads built on website-making platforms. In September 2019, Johnson revealed colorful, brooding character posters, each with the tagline: "Nothing brings a family together like murder". He also recorded an interactive audio commentary to encourage repeat viewing.

  The campaign got its biggest jolt after opening. Ransom's off-white knitted Aran sweater went viral, and the film's official Twitter account briefly renamed itself "Chris Evans' Sweater Stan Account". A merchandise giveaway added to the buzz. The advertising mostly intrigued men but also showed strong appeal among women of all ages.

  Knives Out opened in North America and the United Kingdom on the 27th of November 2019. A week later it expanded to China, France, Australia, Russia and 49 other territories, and its last release was in Japan on the 31st of January 2020. Industry watchers saw a potential hit in the enthusiastic early reviews, the film's self-referential humor and the star power of Evans, Craig and Curtis. Success depended on drawing a broad audience rather than a niche of adults.

  Lionsgate released the film digitally on the 7th of February 2020, and on DVD, Blu-ray and 4K on the 25th of February. Discs include deleted scenes, a behind-the-scenes featurette, a commentary by Johnson, Yedlin and Noah Segan, and an eight-part documentary. It was the second-best-selling disc release in its first US week, with 248,286 copies and $4.6 million. By January 2023 it had sold 1.47 million copies.

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• 8. Reception and Sequels

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  A single weekend of holiday tickets set the pace. After $2 million from advance screenings, Knives Out went wide in 3,391 US theaters and took $41.7 million over the five-day Thanksgiving stretch. That nearly doubled the forecast of $22-25 million, and only the second-weekend Frozen II beat it. Opening-night audiences gave it an A- CinemaScore. About 73 percent of them were over 25, and 63 percent were white. The film kept a place in the top ten for ten weeks, despite playing as an adult film in a season of family blockbusters.

  The final worldwide total was $312.9 million, with $165.4 million from the United States and Canada and $147.5 million overseas. That made it the 29th-highest-grossing film of 2019. China was the strongest overseas market, with $13.5 million in its first week and $27.9 million after four, while the United Kingdom reached $13.7 million in the same time. In Russia, the New Year holiday lifted a week's takings by 152 percent. An estimated $82 million in net profit went to the MRC and Lionsgate partnership.

  Critics were widely positive. Reviewers praised the unusual plot structure, the twists and the way it mocked murder-mystery habits. One description called it "enjoyably, wackily serpentine". Stephanie Zacharek of Time found the family's squabbling over a shared goal the most entertaining part. Manohla Dargis of The New York Times and Uproxx thought the political ideas too vapid to resonate. The harshest reviews called the film convoluted, self-indulgent and heavy on exposition. Uproxx complained that the large cast reduced some interactions to "constant, white noise-esque drone of overacting". Metacritic gave the film 82 out of 100 from 52 critics, which it labels universal acclaim.

  The acting drew special notice. Craig's eccentric sleuth was said to radiate "infectious enjoyment", though some judged his Southern accent harshly. De Armas earned words like "superb" and "wonderful" and was widely seen as having a breakout performance. The film made the American Film Institute and National Board of Review top ten lists for 2019. Its nominations included three Golden Globes, a British Academy Film Award and an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. In December 2021 the Writers Guild of America ranked its screenplay 49th on its list of the 101 greatest of the 21st century so far.

  The sequels came after a deal. Johnson was already thinking about a follow-up while the first film was in theaters, and Lionsgate announced plans in February 2020. But Johnson and Bergman owned the intellectual property, and after the COVID-19 pandemic damaged theaters' profit potential, Netflix bought the rights to two sequels in March 2021 for $469 million. Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery reached Netflix on the 23rd of December 2022, after a controversial one-week theatrical run. Blanc visits the murder-mystery retreat of the tech magnate Miles Bron, played by Edward Norton. A third film, Wake Up Dead Man, began development in 2023 and was briefly delayed by the Writers Guild strike. It follows Blanc as he investigates the killing of an Upstate New York monsignor, played by Josh Brolin, which is blamed on a new priest played by Josh O'Connor. It reached Netflix on the 12th of December 2025, and further development is pending.

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