This review contains some mild spoilers
Writer/director Rian Johnson would like you to know that very wealthy people are generally awful, exhausting, and immoral. But not him, though. He is a rich person who knows what’s what, which is why his latest release, “Glass Onion,” now streaming on Netflix, is such a meticulously crafted satire of the very wealthy. (Allegedly.) Like his previous film, “Knives Out”, this foray into the world of murder-mystery for Johnson might sit alongside some of Agatha Christie’s famed works – most notably “Death on the Nile” or “Evil Under the Sun”. Like those entries, “Glass Onion” (with its unwieldy subtitle, “A Knives Out Mystery”) takes an eclectic mix of mostly wealthy characters and places them with a detective on a luxurious vacation spot, this time an island in Greece, to watch them each grapple with a murder that will upturn the superficial glamour of their lives to reveal the seediness underneath. Johnson will do all this while lampooning the very rich, offering a deconstruction of the contemporary murder-mystery and delighting with name-drop after name-drop, and cameo after cameo. Or, he will at least try to do this.
“Glass Onion” might have the same official budget as its predecessor – $40 million – but each successive moment feels bigger and glitzier and more glamorous. And no wonder. Netflix outbid competitors for the rights to two Johnson penned films for $469 million. And “Glass Onion” does feel more aware of its cachet. In the first film, we were confined to the estate of a well-moneyed family. Here, the setting is flashier, not a single estate but an entire island – a private island in Greece owned by billionaire Miles Bron. Bron invites his closest friends to solve his murder, or his murderous game at least. It’s a well-orchestrated game devised courtesy of famous author Gillian Flynn (one of many celebrity name-drops), but a real murder does happen and then another. And then comes the deconstruction…
Does the penchant for deconstruction come from love or revulsion? It’s anyone’s guess, but I’m not sure how much faith Rian Johnson has in the murder mystery as a genre. In “Knives Out” the subversion of the trope seemed baked into its conceit. At first, we think we are solving a straightforward mystery, only for the main suspect to become our window into the story, making each ensuing moment a revelation for her and for us. In “Glass Onion” – bigger and flashier – the deconstruction is even more ambitious. The sleight of hand is both in terms of who the victim is, but even knottier when the film’s actual mystery does not reveal itself until one hour into the film courtesy of a forty-minute flashback sequence that pulls the brakes on whatever momentum has been earned so far.
Before the mystery gets properly underway, we spend time meeting a cast of very wealthy, mostly awful people. For “Glass Onion” is not merely a whodunit. It is also a very literal, very unsubtle attempt at satire. Beyond Edward Norton’s Elon Musk-like figure of Miles Bron and Daniel Craig’s returning turn as detective Benoit Blanc, we are introduced to the vapid fashionista socialite (a loose and charismatic Kate Hudson); her assistant Peg (a very game Jessica Henwick); a men’s right activist in the vein of an Alex Jones type (Dave Bautista); his girlfriend, Whiskey (Madelyn Cline); the soccer-mom politician (Kathryn Hahn, in a wasted bit of casting); the suave, charming scientist (Leslie Odom Jr., even more wasted) and Janelle Monáe’s Cassandra Brand. The group makes for an eclectic, and unwieldy, collection. In “Knives Out”, an effortful attempt at subverting a familiar thriller convention, Johnson at least had a built-in focus for his cast. That film is quite explicit in its lampooning of a particular kind of White-liberal ideology that reveals itself for its myopia. In “Glass Onion”, Johnson ups the ante. The players feel pulled from a cursory trove of social media in the last two years and not in a way that feels thoughtful or illuminating. It is weighed down by its excess.
For a film set on a private island, an entire geographical landscape to play with, it is a sign of a lack of imagination that “Glass Onion” deigns to use two settings – a poolside and an art-room. Jenny Eagan’s costumes are wonderfully precise and find savvy ways of deploying characterisation but although the aesthetics of “Glass Onion” are never truly ugly it retains an alarming incuriosity about its surroundings, with the closest thing to a visual through line being explicit brightness or a brief sequence in the dark during a power outage. All the money in the world, and “Glass Onion” never feels meaningfully engaged in any aesthetically definitive approach to a mystery.
“Glass Onion” is saying the right things, in theory. That it arrived in cinemas in November while Elon Musk was ruining Twitter in a fit of pique felt like free marketing for the man-child billionaire at the centre of Johnson’s film. Except, the same desperation of Miles in “Glass Onion” feels at one with the sheen of the film itself. Early on, at a COVID-era party, a musical recitative provides a brief puzzle for three of the main characters. Yo-Yo Ma, famed American cellist and guest at the party, sidles into the frame to solve the case of the musical earworm – Bach’s Little Fugue in G-Minor. After explaining the concept of a fugue to us, he disappears. Later in the film, a conversation between Blanc and his co-sleuth is overlooked by a digital projection of a bored Serena Williams, until we realise that it is not a projection but a live-call with the tennis mogul – on call in the gym for guests of the house to have a training session.
These are not the only cameos in “Glass Onion”. Some arrive in name only, name-dropped, or pictured. Others (like Tony winners Stephen Sondheim and Angela Lansbury) arrive to play themselves. A former British heartthrob shows up as Blanc’s partner. These are all bits of delight to amuse the carefully attuned audience but by the fifth of them, these cameos felt no way different than the name-dropping Miles is preoccupied with in the film – from Jared Leto’s kombucha to Jeremy Renner’s hot-sauce and Anderson Cooper’s wild party. Miles must let everyone know that he is part of the in-crowd. The cameos, when they occur in “Glass Onion”, are not constructed for us to be concerned by their appearance but for us to marvel in their existence in the same way that a character is rendered speechless by the appearance of Serena Williams before her eyes. It feels telling that “Glass Onion”, which ends with a blustering disavowal of excess (hollow as it may be) seems as caught up in the same excess it nominally aims to critique. Allegedly.
But maybe rich people should stop making movies about rich people being awful? How soon before they realise the call is coming from inside the house? “Glass Onion” is not an isolated case. It is not even the first ensemble film this season to engage with transgressions of the rich. “Triangle of Sadness” and “The Menu” are two ensemble films released in just the last six weeks that have their pulse – however inelegantly – on the lifestyles of the rich and famous. In these films the maxim of “eat the rich” becomes the thesis. For what better way to make fun of the rich than by mocking them on screen? No matter that these films are typically made for, and acted by, the rich. “Glass Onion” would not be so exhausting as a critique of the rich if it were at least interested in being a good mystery. For all the obfuscation that Johnson may throw at us, the height of mystery in “Glass Onion” is too obvious to be intrigued by. When the first chronological murder victim is revealed, the journey from suspects to revelation is as stale as the actual murderer.
Even as the first thirty-minutes end up working only as table-setting before the actual film begins around the one-hour mark, the opening breeziness is a marked improvement over the final thirty minutes of “Glass Onion,” which give into the worst instincts of obviousness. The very structure of the film, so tightly spotted that discussing it without spoiling it is near impossible, is one that offers little to consider after it has been solved. Johnson offers Monáe an ambitious challenge, but it is one which traps her in a film that goes nowhere. Monáe, a charismatic personality and a mostly charming performer, has been at her most compelling in two different films in two different registers: warmly beguiling in “Moonlight” and impatiently tenacious in “Hidden Figures”. Her range is not the widest, but she does have range so that the challenge that “Glass Onion” presents for her is not one that is beyond her, in theory. Then why does her performance feel so cumbersome? The very fabric of “Glass Onion” gives her little to do with her own natural charm.
Over his last three films, Johnson’s ability to extract character has given me pause and in “Glass Onion” his tendencies are at their murkiest. These are not characters as much as they are signifiers for Johnson to perform a bit of political discourse. I will hold any 21st century murder-mystery up against the still unparalleled genius of “Gosford Park,” which found a way to juggle two dozen characters and motives with every new one seeming real and cogent. In “Glass Onion”, seven is a tall order, not just in the writing but in the direction. Johnson, so often, positions them in clusters doing the least with myriad potential for blocking them. These people do not interact as if they know each other, so the best parts of ensembles – seeing who is congregated where and with whom – feel absent here. Hudson fares best, on the backs of her own charisma than anything within the script and always doing something beyond the centre of the screen. Monáe fares worst, saddled with a challenge she cannot quite scale. (It also does not help that hidden within the schemas of her role as Cassandra Brand, lies a name perilously close to Sandra Bland, a Black woman who died in police custody in 2015 under suspicious circumstances.)
Considering where “Glass Onion” decides to go, this could be Johnson’s own say-her-name homage except Johnson’s own idea of political critique is so insipid, the thought is alarming, except the burn-it-all-down coda of “Glass Onion” seems certain that it is communicating something thoughtful about economic class and the nature of justice. It is not so much that Johnson’s politics are unpersuasive, but that “Glass Onion” unravels from the weight of all the ideas it seems compelled to include. When the first chronological death is revealed, with a seriousness that interrupts the playful insouciance of what has become before, I winced trying to think of how Johnson would marry the very dubious implications of it with the jaunty tone of the film. He does not even try. The moments of real-world gravity in “Glass Onion” are hand waved away when they become too complicated for Johnson to deliver an empty trifle of lacklustre clues and problem solving, yet at every turn he keeps winking at these real-world parallels. It becomes a case of diminishing returns, a juiceless film more satisfied with its own awareness of the terminally online than with attention to detail.
What’s worse, “Glass Onion” does not even give the audience watching a chance to participate in the problem solving when its very structure robs us of the central gambit of murder-mysteries – solving them with the detective. When the ending comes, after an extended exposition dump and then a scene of empty destruction in the guise of something victorious, you would be forgiven if you’d forgotten what stakes the triumphantly exulting character was fighting for.
