In today's age of attention deficit and lack of commitment to any activities over an hour long, the surest way to get me to sit down and watch a movie is the tried-and-true mystery thriller, a genius genre of work that keeps me turning the page (if it's in book form) or prevents me from turning the channel (if it's TV/movie). Which is exactly what happened last night at a white elephant Christmas party I went to, where the festivities eventually turned to watching a recently released movie, "Knives Out," a critically acclaimed work. I was going to go home soon before the movie started, but was trapped after the first scene of the victim being found dead.......and just couldn't take my eyes off of the screen. I have to imagine that it is quite tedious and arduous to write a mystery thriller and having to write backwards, knowing what the ending is but then dropping enough clues for the audience to keep them intrigued and gradually progress the story without giving too much away for them to be able to guess the ending, while dropping major plot twists along the way. The best mystery novels appeal to our senses of being in suspense and the young detectives in all of us trying to solve a mystery with the little information that's given to us.....I found myself often going over the events in my head during the movie, something I don't usually do for romantic novels, family dramas, blockbuster hits, or almost any other movie where I just sit and sort of absorb. It also appeals to my love of magic shows, where the magician does something seemingly impossible (similar to locked-room murders or some other seemingly impossible way of killing someone) and keeping the audience guessing, except luckily in mystery thrillers you get the assurance of knowing you'll see how the magician did it at the end.
My progression of mystery thrillers has progressed steadily and always stayed with me throughout my life, starting with "Nate the Great" books as a kid, progressing to Nancy Drew and Encyclopedia Brown to getting into Agatha Christie novels in high school, as well as the board game "Clue" and the novels that the game was based on, with the iconic phrases like "Colonel Mustard in the Billiard Room with the Candlestick." There are even mystery societies that dedicate themselves to watching murder-mysteries and certain patterns like 1.) the victim often dies in the beginning and we learn about them through flashbacks, 2.) there's a quirky, eccentric famous detective who takes the case, 3.) there's a network of likely suspects who all have some sort of motive for the victim to die, 4.) red herrings that throw the audience off the scent to mask some other trivial clue that becomes very significant later. These typical elements were all satisfied in "Knives Out," but it didn't come off as contrived or unoriginal because the story was able to carve out its own characteristics and even thrown in elements of current society like "Instagram influencers" and the immigration backlash in the US. I guess I've missed these type of pure murder-mysteries as opposed to the hybrid horror/mystery or drama/mysteries that have other elements to their movie other than mystery, like "Parasite" or "The Minority Report."
Merry Christmas to all!
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