The newest trailer for Rian Johnson’s Knives Out is riddled with lies, conjecture, and heavy-duty familial dysfunction. Thanksgiving cannot come soon enough.
Fresh from the Toronto International Film Festival (where critics—including The A.V. Club’s own A.A. Dowd—sung its deserved praises), the darkly humorous whodunit is ready to stump audiences nationwide. Armed with a star-studded roster of potential suspects that includes Chris Evans, Ana De Armas, Jamie Lee Curtis, Don Johnson, Michael Shannon, Toni Collette, LaKeith Stanfield, and Katherine Langford, the Agatha Christie-inspired Knives Out aims to solve the puzzle surrounding the sudden death of a beloved author (Christopher Plummer). The newest glimpse teases enough motives and shady finger-pointing to supply a solid, deeply webbed mystery. Who killed Harlan Thrombey? Who knows?
Per Dowd’s spoiler-free review, Knives Out is “an ingenious sleight-of-hand crowdpleaser, doesn’t just build to a whopper of an ending, as all Agatha Christie riffs must. It stacks surprises on top of surprises, springing them so early and often that responsibly writing about the film becomes an exercise in obfuscation itself, turning critics into guilty parties with secrets to conceal, like Leopold and Loeb dancing around that dead body in Rope.” Again, Thanksgiving can get here whenever it’s ready.