Glass Onion threads the Agatha Christie needle

The only problem with Rian Johnson’s new murder mystery Glass Onion (streaming on Netflix) is that by the time the main cast is gathered I would have been happy if almost any one of them was murdered. Though, as a connoisseur and master of the genre, Johnson seems to see this as a design feature, not a flaw.

A group of self-described “disrupters” have gathered at the island paradise of tech-bro Miles Bron (Edward Norton) for their annual reunion right at the start of the COVID pandemic. Bron is an incompetent narcissist who has lived in an echo chamber of fawning praise for so long he might believe his own half-baked speeches about being the only person brave enough to take down “the system.” The echo chamber resounds the loudest when he is surrounded by his oldest, dearest friends, who also happen to owe him their careers and personal fortunes. He has gathered them all on the island for an elaborate murder mystery game that, as the genre goes, turns out to be more than a game.

Glass Onion follows Johnson’s wildly popular 2019 film Knives Out (one of my favorite films of the past five years), where he introduced the world to Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), a master detective in the grand tradition of Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot, who returns in Glass Onion. Murder mysteries have never gone out of fashion, but they are having a moment of minor revival: along with Johnson’s movies there are recent films like See How They Run (directed by Tom George, 2022) and Kenneth Branagh’s adaptations of Murder on the Orient Express (2017) and Death on the Nile (2022), all three of which look to source texts by Agatha Christie, the rightful godmother of the genre.