Intro
A hilarious whodunit mystery, Knives Out is a film that has more to say than meets the eye. Set in modern day America, the film follows Latina nurse Marta Cabrera (Ana De Armas) who is involved in the suicide of her boss Harlan Thrombey, renowned writer and wealthy owner of publishing house Blood Like Wine. Infamous private investigator Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) is solicited by an unknown source and begins to unravel the relationships within the Thrombey Family which are inextricably linked to Harlan's death.
The visual storytelling of the film is masterfully done, with hidden details and easter eggs that make it an enjoyable rewatch. Clever additions to the story like the creation of a primary suspect that literally can’t lie without vomiting and naming the real suspect of the crime Ransom gave the story a charismatic spin that I don’t think I’ve ever seen in a film. But the theme that stood out to me the most was what a mess family can be.
When Dysfunction Meets Money
Part of the reason we treat strangers better than our own family members is because we know our family members' boundaries well enough to know we can violate them without them leaving. This, among many other reasons, is why family can be more of a toxic soup of dysfunction than it can be a safe place of emotional support. Unlike a friendship that is voluntary and revocable, a family (except in the case of marriage) is involuntary. It’s made up of those who show up for one another out of obligation if liking or loving each other is off the table.
The intimacy of a familial bond breeds a closeness that can be explosive and exploitative as every person learns each other's secrets and insecurities, and manipulates them to their advantage. Children and spouses develop unhealthy coping mechanisms to deal with the underdeveloped relationship skills and low EQs of their fellow brethren and before you know it, dysfunction is born and passed on down the family tree.
Early in the film, Linda mentions proudly she had a secret way of communicating with her father. In order to get along with him, you had to find a game to play with him. This communication/relationship style suggests that Harlan may have not only failed to be emotionally present for his children but also failed to reveal certain truths in the direct manner they needed to hear them only doing so when it was too late.
The Thrombeys are made up of Harlan's children (Linda, Neil-deceased, and Walt), their respective spouses (Richard, Joni, and Donna), and their respective children (Hugh Ransom Drysdale, Meg, and Jacob). The whole ordeal starts when the Thrombeys gather to celebrate Harlan’s 85th birthday. Towards the end of it, Jacob hears a fight ensue between Harlan and the asshole trust fund baby of the family, Ransom, who leaves the house clearly upset.
The party soon disperses as everyone heads to bed. Marta and Harlan head upstairs to play a quick game of Go before Marta gives Harlan his medication for the night. Unfortunately, she mixes them up, accidentally overdosing Harlan with morphine. Instead of calling an ambulance and potentially implicating Marta whose mother is undocumented, he devises his final game that would give Marta an alibi and a way out of being charged before slitting his own throat.
After that, it’s off to the races.
Benoit Blanc arrives on the scene and quickly realizes Harlan’s negative relationship with his family. It doesn’t help that the Thrombey’s in general are terrible people. Self absorbed and clearly out for their own self interest they are everything you would expect a wealthy family would be. Linda is a proud successful business owner who conveniently forgets her father loaned her millions of dollars to help her get her start while Walt has built his career trying to manage the family business and never attempting to build anything for himself. Joni is a lifestyle guru who only pretends to be enlightened and Richard plays the role of husband while also cheating on his presumably provider wife Linda.
His grandchildren are of course no better. Meg represents the Gen Z social justice warrior who advocates for equal rights as long as she doesn’t have to compromise her position on the socioeconomic ladder. Jacob is an alt-right conservative thus serving as her antithesis, and Ransom is the trust fund baby who has always had it made.
Not only are the Thrombey’s addicted to money but thanks to their patriarch they have learned to see people as either winners or losers and life as a game of gains and losses. With losing, of course being the ultimate failure, they all do everything in their power to come out a winner.
Harlan is painfully aware of this and how, as the financial pioneer of the family, he has become a pawn in their self interested game. He knows the monster he’s created and makes real attempts to set his family back on track. He fires his son Walt from his business, cuts off his daughter in law Joni after confronting her about the fact she’s been stealing money from him, and lastly cuts Ransom out of the will.
As the Thrombey’s keep secrets from one another and spill out others during questioning, it is very clear that they don’t really like each other all that much. They may love each other, sure, but to say they enjoy each other's company (particularly Ransom's company) would be a bit of a stretch. After the party ends, they are all quick to leave town and resume their lives only staying for what is the most important thing to all of them: the reading of Harlan’s will.
An Unlikely Heroine
Marta is an immigrant nurse who, unlike the Thrombey’s, cares deeply for those she loves and is undeniably a kind and honest person. She’s satisfied with what she has for the most part and isn’t constantly looking to take more from those around her. She even sees Harlan as a friend she gladly shows up for rather than someone she just works for.
So when she is forced to omit the truth during her interactions with Blanc, she reluctantly does so. When she receives the news that she is the sole inheritor of Harlan’s inheritance she expresses shock, disbelief, and apprehension. She is ambushed by the Thrombey’s and faces multiple attempts to get her to give the money to the family. Even though most of them don’t need it anyway. The only Thrombey she does team up with is the most unlikeable one of them all: Ransom.
Despite Marta’s actions and her attempt to avoid being tied with Harlan’s suicide, despite her working with Ransom of all people, you are still rooting for her. Because you know that she is playing a game she doesn’t want to play, but is doing so anyway to ensure the survival of her family. She clearly feels guilty about killing Harlan and made real attempts to save his life. She’s not a murderer, just an unfortunate but kind nurse who made a mistake.
We see this clearly when she finds Fran’s body (Harlan’s housekeeper) at the rendezvous point of the toxicology report she receives earlier. Fran has clearly overdosed on morphine and is dying. At that moment, Marta has the choice: let her die and escape or save her. She has nothing to gain from Fran’s survival and her death wouldn’t be tied to her. Yet she still stops, performing CPR, and calls an ambulance to her aid.
Benoit Blanc serves as the tool used to wrap up the story. He reveals that Ransom upon hearing that everyone would be cut out of the will returns to the house to switch the medication in Marta's bag in hopes she would kill Harlan making her ineligible to receive the inheritance. When he learns she has done her job correctly, he then devises a new plan hiring Benoit Blanc to track her down and arrest her for murder. He then decides to overdose Fran (who had caught him digging through Marta’s bag and was using that information to blackmail him for money) on morphine. When Ransom is tricked into confessing he killed Fran, his epic plan comes to an epic failure.
A Beautiful Pattern = A Beautiful Life
Part of the reason I love ‘Knives Out’ so much is how it reveals certain truths. Harlan’s inability to set boundaries with his children and foster open communication with them created people who refused to see the truth and the gift Harlan was trying to give them by excluding them from the will. He was trying to get them to stand on their own two feet and forge a life on their own terms, not on his. He was offering them a second chance to see the world not as a game of wins and losses but as a classroom.
Fran and Ransom both had a truth no one else knew about but instead of coming clean, both of them used it to leverage it for their own gains with Ransom committing the crime. Marta on the other hand knew the truth and acted selfishly but in the end told the truth to trick Ransom into confessing and protecting herself and her family.
I remember reading a short story called Retirement written by Frank Kidd in Pulp, Pipe and Poetry. It was essentially about a man who had wasted his life away working an unnecessary job he hated only for him to die on his last day there with his spirit never being allowed to leave the building. It was a terrifying story warning us about the risks we take when we allow ourselves to play life’s game on someone else's terms.
In the end, out of all those close to Harlan, Marta is the only one who got the lesson he was trying to impart. Ransom’s entire plan to get Marta to kill Harlan and cover up his tracks depends on Marta being a bad nurse and a bad person. Harlan’s plan to get Marta off the hook assumes she’ll be playing the game exactly as he says and she lets both of them down, instead playing the game on her own terms. She uses her truth in order to protect what she already has, which is her livelihood and her family. It’s in this sense that Marta’s heroine's journey serves as a reminder to not just live life to win but to live in order to build a beautiful one.
Here is the video that helped to inspire some of my points and breaks down the film even further.
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