Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery

The Empty Center of the Room

I’ve always had a weakness for the Agatha Christie style of murder mystery where rich, awful people swan around in expensive clothes until one of them ends up dead. Rian Johnson clearly loves that format too. *Knives Out* in 2019 felt wrapped in wool and mahogany, a cozy little box of old-money bitterness. I assumed the sequel would simply reshuffle the same pleasures. Instead, *Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery* (2022) blows the windows open and throws us into brutal Greek sunlight. It’s a harsher shift than I expected. Johnson trades gothic inheritance drama for tech-bro delusion, and he goes directly after the sort of billionaire who mistakes relentless self-promotion for genius.



It’s hard to look at the film now and not think of Elon Musk. Johnson has said the screenplay was finished long before Musk’s Twitter era became unavoidable, but the resemblance still feels eerie. Edward Norton’s Miles Bron is a fool with enough money to make his foolishness look visionary, at least from a distance. His island compound is topped by the giant glass onion of the title, a perfect joke in architectural form: ornate, supposedly profound, and completely empty at the center. Johnson keeps returning to the ugliness of Bron’s wealth. The estate is packed with borrowed masterpieces and useless luxuries, and the production design turns all of it into a loud collage of privilege without taste.

There’s an early dockside scene I can’t get out of my head because it captures the movie’s moment in history so precisely. Bron’s little circle of “disruptors” gathers to board the yacht in the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic. Plenty of movies would either ignore that reality or use it as a lazy gag. Johnson uses it as instant characterization. The politician wears a sensible mask and then immediately breaks protocol to hug someone. The scientist wears his correctly. The men’s rights fool doesn’t wear one at all. And the fading pop star arrives in a sparkling mesh mask that would stop nothing. It’s a tiny observational bit, but it lays bare their selfishness before the dialogue even gets a chance.



Daniel Craig comes back as Benoit Blanc and somehow makes the drawl even thicker, even sillier, without losing the character’s charm. After so much time spent watching Craig absorb pain as James Bond, seeing him loll around in a striped vintage swimsuit is its own small joy. But the movie really tilts toward Janelle Monáe. As Andi—and then Helen—she has the hardest assignment in the cast: keeping the movie emotionally grounded while everyone around her goes broad. She nails it. When Bron’s elaborate puzzle-box invitations go out, everyone else fusses over them for hours. Monáe’s character solves the problem by taking a hammer to the box. It’s a fantastic bit of performance and a beautifully clean joke. In her shoulders you can read all the exhaustion of a Black woman done entertaining the games of mediocre white men.



I’m not fully persuaded the pacing is as tight as the first film’s. Johnson asks the audience to absorb a huge narrative reset midway through, and that’s either exhilarating or frustrating depending on your mood. Peter Bradshaw’s description in *The Guardian* is apt: Johnson "uncorks an absolute showstopper of a flashback a half-hour or so into the action, which then unspools back up to the present day." It’s a bold structural gambit. Whether you find it thrilling or irritating will depend on how much patience you have for the movie snatching away momentum just as it has started to hum.

Once it clicks back into place, though, *Glass Onion* stops pretending to be a tidy little puzzle and becomes something angrier and more destructive. It’s broad, noisy, openly American in the way it goes after its target. Maybe that lack of finesse is the point. If you’re trying to torch a glass palace, subtlety probably isn’t the right accelerant.