Benoit Blanc finds himself among the affluent, the influent and the effluent.
Rian Johnson returns to the world of Benoit Blanc with Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, a sequel that sharpens its blade and slices even deeper into the absurdities of wealth, power, and privilege. Trading the autumnal, Clue-box setting of the original for a sun-drenched Grecian getaway, Johnson isn’t interested in simply remixing his previous success – he’s dismantling the expectations of the genre itself, exposing its inner workings with a mischievous grin.
Daniel Craig is clearly having a blast reprising his role as the Southern-fried super sleuth, this time thrust into a game designed by tech billionaire Miles Bron (Edward Norton), whose private island retreat becomes the stage for a very real, very deadly puzzle. Craig’s Blanc remains an endearingly eccentric presence, but this time around, he’s in a game where the players are as ridiculous as the mystery itself.
The ensemble cast is a murderer’s row of scene-stealers, each embodying a different flavour of modern excess. Janelle Monáe commands attention with a layered performance that keeps shifting the film’s centre of gravity, while Kate Hudson revels in playing a vapid former model whose ignorance borders on weaponised. Hudson’s role as Birdie Jay, who blissfully ignored the unethical production practices behind her fitness wear line, playfully riffs on her real-life association with Fabletics – though, it must be said, Fabletics itself prides itself on its ethical standards. Dave Bautista subtly skewers figures like Joe Rogan with his role as Duke Cody, a men’s rights influencer whose tough-guy persona is revealed as the craven artifice it is as he subjugates himself to his sponsors’ grace and favour. Bautista’s performance impressively balances satire and authenticity, cleverly avoiding outright parody. Kathryn Hahn as the bankrolled politician utterly dependant on the beneficence of her oligarchical master and Leslie Odom Jr as Bron’s long-suffering engineer tasked with making his master’s latest brainfart and workable reality round out the cast as power players with their own secrets, each given a chance to shine – or, more accurately, to self-destruct spectacularly.
Johnson’s satire, though, is particularly biting in its portrayal of Miles Bron, an unmissable and unmistakable pastiche of tech moguls in general and Elon Musk in particular. A vain, insecure buffoon, whose self-made mythos masks an inherited and opportunistic reality of stolen ideas, and billion-dollar bullying to buy the adulation of those around him, Musk is almost too ridiculous, tragic and malignant a figure to parody but Edward Norton delivers a masterclass of understated insecurity, the toxic mix of entitled narcissism and pathological approval seeking firmly pinning the worst and richest man in the world like an needy edgelord butterfly in a display case. The film takes general aim at the hubris of billionaire culture, influencers, and the performative nature of modern discourse, making it as much a societal takedown as it is a whodunit, but make no mistake – its targets are real, deliberate, and archly specific.
The film’s structural ingenuity is its real triumph, peeling back its layers with meticulous precision. Johnson doesn’t just construct a mystery; he deconstructs it, shifting perspectives and recontextualising information in ways that make a second viewing even more rewarding. The “aha!” moments come not just from plot twists but from the way the film weaponizes audience assumptions, inviting them to reconsider everything they thought they knew.
Visually, Glass Onion is a feast of opulence, bathed in golden Mediterranean light, with Rick Heinrichs’ production design crafting a billionaire’s playpen filled with absurd riches and self-indulgent artefacts. Nathan Johnson’s playful score dances along with the narrative, teasing out the film’s tone – equal parts satire and suspense.
If Knives Out was Johnson’s affectionate riff on Agatha Christie’s traditional whodunit, Glass Onion feels like him gleefully dismantling the genre’s pretensions with a hammer while daring audiences to keep up. It’s bolder, and brasher than its predecessor, a film with more to say and even less concern for playing by the rules. And at the centre of it all is Craig’s Benoit Blanc, a detective who remains as compellingly enigmatic as the mysteries he unravels.
For all its extravagant style and razor-sharp humour, Glass Onion is ultimately a film about peeling back facades – whether of the rich, the powerful, or the stories we tell ourselves. And just like the film’s titular metaphor, the truth at its core isn’t hidden behind complexity. It’s been in plain sight all along, waiting for someone sharp enough to see it.
