Diving into a Rian Johnson mystery is like being plunged, in all the best possible ways, into a maelstrom of brilliantly executed ideas, fantastically well-realised characters who brim with flaws and vigour and a storyline so robustly intricate you glory in its enticing complexity and almost clap with glee as how clever it all is.
And yet for all its intelligence and the intricate layering of ideas that feels like Agatha Christie on gloriously amped steroids that fill every last frame, what strikes you too, and this is important since cleverness without heart is seldom satisfying, at least not in the long-term, is the attendant emotional accessability.
That comes to the fore in the first third of the film which doesn’t rush into the committing of a crime and the fast tracking to its solving which is where most films of the genre likely would have rushed in the modern era because we are no loner a patient people, but rather takes its own sweet time letting us get to know the people around whom all the riddles and questions and blurry-until-realised motives and actions will swirl.
They are a mixed bag of souls and you wonder at first how on earth they could possibly know each other, and as closely as they clearly do; what also immediately becomes clear is that whatever warmth was there at the start of the relationships between the members of the group has long receded and cooled into a simmering dislike and distrust masked by a pragmatic need to remain in some sort of contact.
The link, it turns out, is tech billionaire, Miles Bron (Edward Norton), co-founder of a company named Alpha and a man who delights in ballsy, arrogant acts of quirk and eccentricity, whose gigantic home on a private Greek island is topped by a giant transparent ball, the “glass onion” of the title which dominates the home, the island and, it turns out, the lives of this disparate group of individuals.
As we get to know the group – Alpha’s lead scientist Lionel Toussaint (Leslie Odom Jr.) who clearly has Miles’ ear, Connecticut governor Claire Debella (Kathryn Hahn), hapless, clueless fashion model Birdie Jay (Kate Hudson), who is someone who confuses speaking without thought for speaking the truth (as a key character archly observes at one point), muscled-up toxic men’s rights activist Duke Cody (Dave Bautista) and ousted co-founder of Alpha Andi brand (Janelle Monáe) – it becomes apparent that far from the close group of friends they first appear, they are linked now only in their proximity to Bron.
Their arrival on his island for a long weekend of mystery solving – Bron has concocted, with the help of a crime novelist who charges a commensurate fortune for her highly-detailed work, a scenario where he will be “murdered” and his guests must spend their time working out whodunnit.
None of them look too thrilled to be engaged in that kind of pursuit, save for Birdie who, when she’s not casually engaging in casually racist or politically oblivious behaviour, is always up for a party of any kind, and the weekend, so promising in Bron’s eyes, takes a strange turn when a sixth person turns up, Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), who you will recall was the sleuth-in-chief of 2019’s Knives Out.
It’s clear that Bron is thrown by the presence of both Blanc and Andi Brand, with whom the emotionally unreadable billionaire (on the surface he’s all avuncular charm but something darkly disturbing lurks behind the charmingly corrosive facade), and by extension the holidaying group of friends who are clearly beholding to him have had an acrimonious falling out, but quite why that is doesn’t emerge until later in a film which, befittingly for a member of the crime genre, is only revealed in masterfully revealed morsels, all of which add up to one hell of a hard-to-digest meal (for the characters, not the film, which is superlatively good throughout).
The brilliance of Glass Onion, the intricacies and thoughtfulness of which is blindlingly impressive, is that it inserts a great deal of humanity into its mystery solving.
This is true of most experly-executed entries in the crime genre wich should have at their heart the dark flaws and foibles of the human condition if they are to have any impact at all.
For while we love the thrill of red herrings being cast aside, clues connected and a stunningly delivered denouement arrived at, what really intrigues and captivates is what the people who are both the cause and mostly the victims (of course, a least one person has to be the architect of the mystery and thus the guilty party) do in the midst of this situation.
Answer: they act largely in their own craven self interest, and while in Glass Onion, only one person is the one with their finger on the trigger and their hand on the poison jar, everyone is, to some extent guilty of crimes against what it means to be selflessly, altruistically human.
Bron’s friends, while ostensibly poster childen for the species and leading lights of success and achievement, are all flawed as hell, willing to thrown whoever needs to be thrown under the bus to keep their cosy corner of existence blissfully undisturbed.
They may not be the villain du jour – or are they? In true crime movie reviewing style, revealin who is the guilty party must be left to Glass Onion‘s stunning emotionally-charged final act which is a masterclass in shattering humanity and raw, messy justice – but they are guilty of robbing from the wellbeing of othes to advance the interests of others, and very few of the characters escape without blood on their hands and black marks on their souls.
It is this collective damning of those who have given more of their souls than the average over to whatever form you think the devil takes – the devilish pacts that litter Glass Onion are wide and varied but always come to crushingly cruel self interest – that really makes the film come alive.
At the end, it is Blanc, in true detective/revealer of baser human motives, in true Poirot/Marple fashion, and one other character whose identity and influence on both the narrative and the style of storytelling are breathtakingly creative and good, who calls everyone to account as he both solves the mystery and damns people for their willingness to trade the welfare of others for their own on a systematically ongoing and ultimately damaging basis.
There is a redemption and a paying for sins at the end of the Glass Onion which happens in an explosively final way and which sends the message, as do all good crime stories, that when we elevate ourselves at the expense of others, there are consequences and oh how how watchably theatrical they are, especially in the hands of Rian Johnson.