Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022 | USA | 139 minutes | Rian Johnson)
Audiences (and filmmakers) are extremely touchy about having details revealed in advance of tentpole entertainments and start-studded comedy-mysteries. So I’ll start with this non-SPOILER: Rian Johnson is so damned great at making movies. Glass Onion, his return to the ongoing tale of great “southern” detective Benoit Blanc, hammily played by Daniel Craig, is a ridiculously satisfying at every turn. A genuine laugh-out-loud, ever-blooming mystery about a bunch of shithead disrupters who decamp to an ostentatious island estate during the pandemic for some fun and games. With long-simmering rivalries, big money interests, and gigantic egos everything goes hilariously wrong in all the right ways. My fervent hope is that Netflix puts this immensely crowd-pleasing viperpit in theaters before streaming it straight to living rooms. It’s a joy to see with a crowd.
For those willing to tolerate a little more background, the film opens amid lockdown and we meet our players in various states of bubbling. Benoit Blanc is losing his mind in the bathtub, dejectedly playing boardgames with a Zoom room of cameos that are truly better left unspoiled. Kathryn Hahn plays an outsider gubernatorial candidate with funding from a tech zillionaire who’s going stir-crazy running her campaign from her Connecticut McMansion. Leslie Odom Jr. is the genius scientist behind the scenes of that tech company who suffers the indignities of sorting through the eccentric founder’s every faxed idea and turning his goofy koans into something real. Dave Bautista plays an up-and-coming men’s rights live-streaming personality who still lives at home with his mother and whose social climber girlfriend wants more time on his feed to build her own brand. Kate Hudson is the broadest satire of a pop-star model who can’t be trusted with custody of her own cellphone for fear of tweeting out another cancel-worth pronouncement, spending quarantine in a packed hotel suite “bubble” of fire-breathers and twenty-four-hour party people. When the each receive a mysterious wooden box, they hop on a FaceTime call to work through a series of intricate puzzles inviting them to a Greek Island getaway.
Props to Johnson for acknowledging the pandemic, but he finds a funny way to dispense with it when the crew shows up at a dock to be chartered to their destination. A surprise appearance from ousted co-founder Janelle Monáe, arriving in a swoop of glamor and affecting a strong silent demeanor, adds further intrigue to the weekend. Upon arrival, their old buddy — an Elon-like figure, richer than god — played by Ed Norton welcomes them to his ludicrous glass palace and sets the weekend in motion with plans to spend the ensuing days playing a made up murder-mystery game to solve their host’s murder.
The game quickly goes sideways, fault lines emerge among the dear old friends, and Benoit Blanc is there to observe it all. Johnson’s staging is immaculate, with every frame and camera angle packed with jokes. As things go all the way sideways, his camerawork gets more inventive, building suspense through accusations and chasing the players around a darkened mansion intermittently illuminated by a distant lighthouse. It’s pulse-pounding, suspenseful, and never not funny. Just as the action crescendos, the story folds to peel back previously-unseen layers of context. The pacing, performances, and writing are perfectly calibrated and build to a spectacular conclusion. Among the most purely entertaining stretches I’ve spent in a theater all year.
Triangle of Sadness (2022 | Sweden | 143 minutes | Ruben Östlund) – NA Premiere
The follies of the rich were also on the mind of Ruben Östlund, but his daggers are somehow sharper and his targets make worse company. If you’re going to do social satire that’s this broad, it had better be diamond-edged and drowning in the vomit of the most banal wealthy. Triangle of Sadness has plenty of both, plus a beautiful male model who cares deeply about who’s picking up the tab for dinner.
Told in three acts, our guides are the upstart models Carl (Harris Dickinson) and Yaya (Charlbi Dean). He’s still trying to book runway campaigns by mastering his walk and scowl; she’s far more successful and benefits from the rare inverted pay structure of an industry where women far out-earn men. The conclusion of their fancy dinner becomes a clinic in performative gender and economic politics as the two beauties argue without arguing about whose turn it is to drop a credit card in the shiny metal tray. Östlund lives for these small battles and lets it run to agonizing lengths with close camera swings tracking the exchange of verbal and psychological blows.
Later, the couple finds themselves on a luxury yacht. They’re riding for free on her influencer status; the lone breath of youth among a decaying collection of rich people, each of whose fortunes have been made in ever-more boring or offensive fashion. An unnaturally cheery crew attends to their every petty concern with a polished performance of competent servitude among the sparkling seas. When the conspicuously absent captain (Woody Harrelson) finally makes his appearance, the scene is set for one of the grossest dinner sequences I have ever seen. Amid comedically rocky waters, quivering confections of high culinary art contend with widespread seasickness. Gastrointestinal agony contends with a broadcast of a boorish blotto conversation between a Marxist sea captain and a Communist capitalist whose empire was built on shit.
The final act finds a handful of the guests lampooned on a deserted seashore, struggling to survive. Sunbaked and useless, the social order swiftly shifts to one where competence rules. The message isn’t subtle, but its delivered with such enthusiasm from the cast’s embodiment of their distasteful characters and the director’s relentless amplification of agony that it builds to a delirious success. The word “uproarious” may be used too often, but there were parts of this movie where I was literally screaming along with the rest of a crowded theater in disgust and clapping as the dynamics among characters twisted. It’s perspective is darker than the fun and games on Glass Onion island, but sometimes the follies of inequality require a very sharp stick.
Glass Onion (Netflix) and Triangle of Sadness (NEON) had their world and North American premieres at the Toronto International Film Festival; both are scheduled for release later this year. Images courtesy TIFF.