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.

Rian Johnson has championed The Last of Sheila, written by Stephen Sondheim and Anthony Perkins, as a favourite whodunit and a model for his own. What he took is the puzzle as a game staged by a rich host for guests who all have something to hide, with the audience given every clue the detective has. Glass Onion, the sequel, borrows its island party setup even more directly.

Johnson has named Sleuth among the mysteries he loves. It is where the film's tone comes from: a country house full of games and props, a wealthy crime novelist who treats murder as play, and a plot that keeps turning over what the audience thinks it has seen. Filed LOW, since the puzzle structure owes more to Christie.