Hercule Poirot influenced Knives Out

Rian Johnson has described Knives Out as his Christie film and has talked about wanting to write the kind of puzzle he grew up reading rather than a parody of it. The apparatus is Poirot's: a wealthy patriarch dead in a large house, a family who all had reason, a foreign detective the family patronises and underestimates, a reconstruction told in flashback as each account is contradicted, and the assembled drawing-room solution. Benoit Blanc's absurd accent does the job Poirot's Belgianness does: it lets everybody in the room treat him as a novelty while he listens. Johnson's own twist is structural, handing the audience the apparent answer in the first act.