Review: In ‘Glass Onion,’ Daniel Craig Returns To Peel Back The Layers Of A Twisty, Christie-Style Mystery [SPOILERS]
You can wait to see Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery on Netflix at the end of December, but if you can make it to the theater for the movie’s limited run, you should go now.
For one thing, you’re less likely to encounter spoilers that might ruin the mystery for you, like the few that will be in this review. And for another, this is the kind of movie made to be seen in the theater, on a big screen in a dark house full of enthusiastic fans.
Both Knives Out and Glass Onion have classic mystery styles, but Glass Onion hews closer to the setup in Agatha Christie mysteries like Ten Little Indians or Death on the Nile, where a group of people who all have motives to kill each other are isolated in a glamourous location. In this case, it’s the remote Greek island where eccentric billionaire (and Elon Musk stand-in) Miles Bron (Edward Norton) has invited his best pals to participate in a pretend murder mystery where they will attempt to figure out who “killed” him and why. The invitations come in the form of an elaborate puzzle box, which the invitees must collaborate on in order to open in a scene that is enormously fun.
The group of friends, whom Bron calls his fellow “disruptors,” includes fashion designer/social-media disaster Birdie (Kate Hudson) and her assistant/handler Peg (Jessica Henwick), Duke, a fitness influencer/spokesman for toxic masculinity (Dave Bautista) and Whiskey, his girlfriend/sidekick (Madelyn Cline), Lionel, a scientist working for Bron (Leslie Odom Jr.), gubernatorial candidate Claire (Kathryn Hahn), and Miles’ estranged former business partner Andi (Janelle Monáe), who apparently isn’t ready to let bygones be bygones in her feud with everyone else in the group.
Somehow, the “world’s greatest detective” Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) has also scored an invitation to the event, which mystifies Bron because he didn’t invite him. In the spirit of the planned murder mystery party, though, he allows him to stay. That’s a decision he’ll soon come to regret.
Telling any more of the plot would spoil the fun of watching the mystery unfold, because there are fun cameos, celebrity name-drops, misdirects and unexpected twists aplenty. Craig is obviously having great fun as Blanc, spying on the assorted guests as he helps uncover and reveal their secrets. But this movie really belongs to Janelle Monáe, in the same way that Knives Out was Ana de Armas’ movie.
Monelle as Andi is the icy heart of the story, with more secrets than the rest of the group combined. For her, the stakes couldn’t be higher, and writer/director Rian Johnson is right to focus the story on her. (The rest of the group seem like mere caricatures next to her, which is probably the movie’s greatest flaw.)
If you do wait to watch the movie on Netflix next month, try to see with a group of your friends. This is a movie with a lot of laughs, gasps, and WTFs, and you’ll want to share that with as many people as possible.