139 min | PG-13 | November 23, 2022 | Netflix
A tech billionaire flies his hangers-on to a private island for a murder mystery weekend. Benoit Blanc shows up uninvited, and the fake game turns into a real corpse. The puzzle is intricate. The man at the center is hollow.
Benoit Blanc gets an invitation to a murder mystery weekend on a private Greek island. The host is Miles Bron, a tech billionaire who collects friends the way he collects art. He has assembled a politician, a scientist, a fashion mogul, and a meathead influencer, all of whom owe him their careers. The party is a game, until it becomes the real thing. Rian Johnson builds a puzzle box about the emptiness at the center of wealth and the way smart people debase themselves to stay close to the money.
Daniel Craig plays Blanc looser this time, a Southern drawl wrapped around a man who is bored by everything except the truth. Edward Norton plays Miles Bron as a genius who is not a genius, a man who has confused luck and theft for brilliance. Norton makes the vanity specific and the stupidity dangerous. Janelle Monáe carries the film’s spine and plays two registers that the script keeps secret for as long as it can. Kate Hudson plays Birdie Jay as a woman who keeps saying the quiet part loud and Dave Bautista plays Duke Cody as a gun-toting grievance machine. The ensemble understands they are playing hangers-on, and the desperation reads in every laugh at Bron’s bad jokes.
Rian Johnson writes and directs with a structure that doubles back on itself. The first hour shows you events, and the second hour rewinds to show you what you missed. He shoots the island in hard Mediterranean sun, which strips away mystery-genre shadow and dares you to find the clues in plain light. The production design turns Bron’s glass mansion into a literal target, all transparent walls and sightlines that should reveal everything and reveal nothing. Nathan Johnson’s score keeps the comic momentum while a single recurring chime marks the passage of time across the island.
This is a film about how dumb the rich are allowed to be when everyone around them is paid to nod. Bron’s friends call him a visionary because their salaries depend on it. Johnson lets the satire sharpen as the body count rises and never lets the cleverness of the plot smother the contempt underneath it. The mystery is a delivery system for a simpler idea. The man behind the curtain is exactly as small as he looks.