Most viewers, when consuming a piece of murder mystery media, expect layered complexity; they take into account every character’s dialogue, attributes, and motives in hopes of uncovering the buried answers. Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery director Rian Johnson—fully aware of this standard approach to mystery stories—flips the murder mystery genre on its head by featuring conspicuous clues and foreshadowing so straightforward that the audience disregards it as extraneous.

Johnson incorporates seemingly standard yet meticulously intentional staging and direction to explicitly reveal how the film’s murders were committed, well before it is verbally revealed much later. The most striking example is during the film’s first on-screen murder, with Miles handing Duke his own glass. Miles urges his friends to look at Birdie’s extravagant dress spin while simultaneously giving Duke his glass. The shot features Birdie’s dress blurred in the foreground, while Miles and Duke are in focus in the background. While the act is quick, Miles’s deliberate murder of Duke is blatantly displayed. But due to Miles calling attention to the colorful dress, viewers are drawn away from the switching of glasses behind her. Furthermore, when Duke’s phone and gun go missing, Johnson ensures that the film’s cinematography and editing present Miles being in possession of both, without explicitly calling attention to it. In the scenes following Duke’s death, his phone can briefly be seen—in short cuts—in Miles’s back pocket. Moreover, when Miles runs away looking for Andi, he runs unnaturally and clumsily, always keeping at least one hand out of sight, implying he is holding Duke’s gun. These intentional visual cues demonstrate how the truth is often directly embedded in the film’s directing and framework, but always eclipsed by Johnson’s carefully orchestrated spectacles and misdirections.

PC: Google