There are spoilers for each Knives Out mystery ahead!
There’s debate on when the term “whodunit” was coined, with most sources pointing to sometime during the 1930s. However, it’s generally agreed upon that it was technically Edgar Allan Poe who originated this branch of the mystery genre when he introduced the detective C. Auguste Dupin in the 1941 short story The Murders in the Rue Morgue. From there, these stories about mysterious murders and heroes trying to uncover the identity of the culprit have only kept evolving, trying to find new ways to twist and subvert tropes that could very easily become tired. Enter Rian Johnson. He conceived the story of Knives Outafter completing his low-budget thriller Brickand planned to draft a script after the release of the iconic Looper, but he put the project on hiatus after Lucasfilm hired him to make Star Wars: Episode VIII — The Last Jedi.
It’s a bit of an understatement to say that Johnson’s venture into George Lucas‘ galaxy far, far away yielded divisive results. More accurately, The Last Jedi lit the cultural zeitgeist on fire, and that culture war backlash only further inspired Johnson to make Knives Out his next project. The film came out to tremendous praise from critics and audiences alike, and so was born a franchise that’s already one of the best in the history of whodunit films. Led by Daniel Craig‘s Benoit Blanc, one of the most iconic detectives of 21st-century cinema, the trilogy has offered three memorable entries of varying degrees of quality. At the center of those entries is the mystery itself, the heart of any whodunit: Who did it? How? Why? It’s in how creatively and compellingly Johnson answers these questions that the quality of a Knives Out mystery lies. But which Knives Out Movie has the best mystery?
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‘Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery’ (2022)
Where most movies try their best to absorb their audience into an entirely new world, attempting to distract them from most elements of reality, that’s something that Johnson has shown little to no interest in with the Knives Out trilogy. Instead, each installment of the franchise so far has succeeded at directly reflecting and commenting on the cultural and sociopolitical context during which they were made and released. For the second installment in the series, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, that meant a satire poking fun at the steep rise of the “tech bro” billionaire class, contemporary influencer culture, and the social effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Likewise, this resulted in a film far more explicitly comedic than its predecessor, which ended up negatively affecting the actual mystery at the center of the titular glass onion. There’s nothing worse for a whodunit than suspense ruined by unnecessary humor and tonal irregularity, but alas, that’s precisely what the second film in the Knives Out series suffers from on repeated occasions.
Truthfully, though, a so-so Knives Out film is still one of the best comedy movies of the 2020s. However, that doesn’t detract from the fact that the mystery of who killed Andi Brand (Janelle Monáe) and Duke Cody (Dave Bautista) could have done with a little less levity and a little more subtextual complexity, instead of just trying to appeal to the current culture, no matter the cost. The structure and pacing are both kind of uneven, the characters are more archetypal than truly lived-in, and some plot twists feel contrived at best. Because of this, Glass Onion‘s mystery ends up feeling forced more often than not, like Johnson wanted to get a point across but didn’t put much care into ensuring that the story made sense, that the twists fit together, or that Blanc made the smart decisions Knives Out fans had come to expect.
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‘Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery’ (2025)
The latest Knives Out mystery is yet another hit for Netflix, a film for which Johnson drew influences from things like his Christian upbringing, Agatha Christie, Edgar Allan Poe, and John Dickinson Carr‘s The Hollow Man—the latter of which is actually a key plot point in the narrative. Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mysterymay not be as good as the first film in the series, but it sure is a proper return to form following Glass Onion‘s disappointment with smarter plotting, better visuals, and Josh O’Connor delivering the best performance in the franchise so far. Just a few days after its Netflix release, it’s already one of the highest-rated Daniel Craig movies on Letterboxd. And while a lot of its quality comes from its outstanding cast, the gorgeous visuals, and the excellent pacing, it’s the writing and the mystery it presents that really are the strength of this guaranteed classic.
Aside from being thematically sharp, Wake Up Dead Man’s mystery is also intricately layered and absolutely enthralling.
Wake Up Dead Man‘s mystery is filled with superb twists, exceptionally executed tension and suspense, and compelling character arcs that fit into the overarching mystery like a beautifully constructed puzzle. The filmfinds in the conundrum of Monsignor Jefferson Wicks’ (Josh Brolin) seemingly impossible murder a perfect opportunity to reflect on fear-mongering and cults of personality in the modern age, using a small-town Catholic community as a microcosm of Western society. But aside from being thematically sharp, the mystery is also intricately layered and absolutely enthralling. The twists make sense and gel together brilliantly, building up a whodunit that’s not without dark humor, but ultimately understands the seriousness of the material it’s dealing with. The mystery’s a little overlong, particularly during the first hour, but it packs more than enough of a punch in the end.
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‘Knives Out’ (2019)
The tenet of “there’s no beating the original” really does apply when talking about Knives Out, whose first installment is nothing short of one of the most perfect whodunit movies of all time. There’s no beating this star-studded cast, there’s no beating this vibrant pre-Netflix visual aesthetic, there’s no beating the freshness of Johnson’s direction for his first Knives Out outing, and there’s no beating the majestic way in which the many influences behind the film come together to create something entirely special and unique. It’s also both the most thematically subtle and thematically powerful film in the series, dealing with topics like class warfare and immigration in ways that very likely will still ring true decades from now. But what good would great characters, great themes, and great dialogue be in a whodunit without a great mystery to support them all? Thankfully, the mystery of Harlan Thrombey’s (Christopher Plummer) murder is one of the most fascinating of any 21st-century film.
Directly following Alfred Hitchcock‘s advice to not stick to generic suspense and formulaic plot structures to create a compelling whodunit, Johnson instead conceived a thrilling mystery full of perfectly executed tonal shifts and genuinely shocking yet entirely plausible plot twists. As unpredictable as it is satisfying, the first Knives Out mystery finds in Benoit Blanc and Marta Cabrera (Ana de Armas) a perfect vehicle for his every playful diversion, using guilt, sympathy, and plausible deniability as tools to cleverly toy with the audience in constantly inventive ways. It’s a labyrinthine plot, there’s no doubt about that, but once Ransom’s (Chris Evans) guilt is revealed and every piece of the puzzle starts smoothly falling into place, the whole thing starts assembling itself in viewers’ minds as all great whodunit mysteries should. 2019 was one of the greatest years of the 21st century for cinema, and Knives Out is irrefutable evidence as to why.
