Glass Onion

  Rian Johnson expands his range as a dab hand at genre explosions. Here he runs the Agatha Christie murders-at-a-weekend-estate whodunit through the contemporary wringer.

Hero detective Benoit Blanc returns as a Deep American South Poirot. The script gets the brilliant subtle deduction out of the way toot sweet. Blanc solves the planned mystery days earlier than planned. That plot layer out of the way, the deeper mystery and deaths real and apparent proceed.

Villain Miles Bron is like an almost likeable Elon Musk. The smug oligarch lives off his parasitic old friends. If the heartless corrupt destructive moneybag is one nod to our real world, the terrible, ignorant influencer is another. Quoth Birdie Jay: “I'm a truth teller. Some people can't handle it.” Benoit makes the current correction: “It's a dangerous thing to mistake speaking without thought for speaking the truth. Don't you think?” She, like the populist’s masses, doesn’t. Her latest blunder is to praise the world’s biggest sweatshop because she assumes that refers to their making her popular sweatpants.

As the title suggests — and Bron’s castle embodies — this film’s social reality is a hollow center layered with removable, insubstantial appearances. Blanc solves the real mystery — having so quickly despatched the artificial — when he sees past the illusion of substance accorded the wealthy: “Look into the clear centre of this glass onion. Miles Bron is an idiot!” 

By slipping a bit of Bron’s power into a woman’s hand Blanc enables her by smashing his glass art to destroy Bron and his status. The glass art embodies the transparency and fragility of his ostensible accomplishment. The friends who formerly supported him against her now veer with the wind to support her instead. 

However much fun this film is, it’s a sharp-eyed critique of the world’s centralization of power in the hands of the amoral richest. Sending up the genre also blows up the social structure it mirrors. 

We have a lot of fun spotting the array of stars making cameo appearances. The more serious equivalent is seeing our collapsing social order reflected in the glass onion genre this satire sees through, unflinchingly. As the familiar genre conventions are exercised, as through the onion darkly, we’re spurred to more individual responsibility as citizens. 

As Blanc admits, the individual’s power, even the hero's, may seem limited: “I am not Batman. I can find you the truth, I can gather evidence, I can present it to the police and the courts, but that is where my jurisdiction ends.” But without such mobilization of individual responsibility the social mechanism has no impulse to work. 

Nice to see Daniel Craig working up a new franchise, with Bond expertise, a tongue even further in chic cheek and engaged in a more human shenanigan.