Marta is the most unexpected twist as, in the language of the traditional whodunnit, there is the split of the family, the help, and the detective. Instead there is the surprise of Ana de Armas as Marta Cabrera, in a toweringly quiet performance, leading the narrative and revealing much of the mystery very early in the film’s runtime. The greatest deception of Knives Out was its advertising campaign, which suggests an ensemble mystery which never arrives. The Thrombey family were so carefully created they almost appeared three-dimensional Don Johnson’s buffoonish, Hamilton-quoting Richard Drysdale was the most enjoyably nasty one of the clan, but Jamie Lee Curtis brought a prickly humanity to her role as the eldest of the Thrombey siblings, keeping her kin from sliding into pure caricature. The house of the deceased Harlan Thrombey was built from the same blueprints as Clue’s neo-gothic mansion, and the former’s interiors brimmed with the eccentric design of Andrew Wyke’s writerly retreat in Sleuth. It was a sheer joy to watch Rian Johnson’s Knives Out, even if the central mystery was not that difficult to untangle, purely for the paraphernalia of the whodunnit that was littered across every scene.
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