I want to start with a plea: if you have not seen Glass Onion yet, do not read this review any further. Come back when you’ve watched it! Now, on we go:

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Rian Johnson is back with the sun-drenched sequel to 2019’s Knives Out, with Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery.

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I was late to the Knives Out train in November 2019. Busy at college and work, I didn’t have time to go to the cinema and watch many films. In fact, poetically, I did see the sequel to Rian Johnson’s instalment of the Star Wars saga that winter - but I only managed to see Knives Out in May 2020. I first watched it with my family in lockdown - which is the same place that our detective, Benoit Blanc, finds himself in the opening of Glass Onion.

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Sat in his bath, playing online games to pass the time, Blanc - played by Daniel Craig - is bored. The emptiness of the life of a detective between cases is often portrayed, but the experience of pandemic lockdown was perhaps a time that we all felt that same kind of confinement and restlessness. I would usually find pandemic-based media to be difficult to watch. But the use of the COVID-19 pandemic is perfectly suited to the establishment of the characters of the film.

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The ensemble cast, friends of the tech billionaire Miles Bron (Edward Norton), have been invited to his private island in Greece for their annual reunion. No matter that this is May 2020 and these characters are based in the US. To everyone’s surprise, this group also meets Blanc and Andi Brand (Janelle Monáe), the business partner that Bron ousted from their company. Benoit Blanc, who we know from the first instalment to be considerate, wears his mask fully over his mouth and nose - standing far away from the rest of the group. Kathryn Hahn’s Connecticut governor climbs out of her taxi with the mask pulled down under her nose, only correcting it the moment that she realises someone she deems notable, Blanc himself, is paying attention to her. This is a character aware of optics: a congresswoman holidaying in Greece during a pandemic, not wearing her mask properly, and (spoiler) being found at the scene of a murder. For her, everything comes back to her looking the part of a considerate person - but she’s not willing to actually behave that way. The other characters arrive one-by-one. Kate Upton’s Birdie Jay, a model known for her say-it-like-it-is Twitter rants, arrives wearing a beaded mesh face mask that wouldn’t catch her breath. She is style over science. The men’s right activist and Twitch streamer, played by Dave Bautista, arrives with no mask at all - brandishing a gun instead. How appropriate for a weekend away with friends!

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Before I saw the film, I saw Jacob Hall of Slashfilm describe the Knives Out duology as films that feel like “period pieces from the future” that recreate character types from 2019 and 2020. This is something Rian Johnson had pointed towards in an interview with Hall - saying that while we can’t write the archetypes of Agatha Christie’s era (i.e. the butler or the colonel), we can draw on “a broad range of types, of caricatures, of different types from 2019.” Now apply that to the 2020 setting of Glass Onion. We have a morally-devoid tech billionaire, a men’s rights YouTuber, a two-faced politician, a perpetually ‘cancelled’ social media figure, and a harried PR assistant. You can put a real name to any of those character types, or you can write them into a murder mystery story to rival Poirot.

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I couldn’t stop thinking about this while I was watching it. I think there are few stories that are set in the ‘present’ that are able to sidestep the pitfall of feeling outdated after they’re released. We are three years down the line from Knives Out and already it’s like peering into a time machine on the world of 2019. I think time will reflect on Glass Onion in much the same way. The fact it is such a highly specific time period helps us orientate the characters in the story, but doesn’t make it feel dated.

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And wow. Did Rian Johnson perform some kind of ritual in order to bless us with this timing? The story that follows - despite being set in 2020 - also feels extremely specific to the setting of the film’s release, in November 2022. He couldn’t have predicted this - but suddenly we have seen chaos wrought by a billionaire, his plans blowing up in his face, and the destruction of (or at least minor inconvenient damage to) one of the most famous paintings of all time. Glass Onion gives us Miles Bron and the burning of the Mona Lisa, but reality gives us Elon Musk and the October 2022 souping of Sunflowers.

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The finale is unsurprisingly the highlight of many murder mysteries. We want to know how all of the threads pull together to explain what we’ve seen. In Glass Onion, we watch with not only a sense of satisfaction of learning the truth, but also a sense of catharsis of seeing our hero, Helen, get justice for her sister in such a perfect way.

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After a film of being beaten down by circumstance, with Bron burning the only piece of evidence of her sister’s truth, Helen begins calmly walking around the art room, knocking down some of the many glass sculptures on display. As the ensemble watches on, no one can feel anything but pity - until suddenly the tension breaks and the rest of them, one-by-one, begin to join in. The feeling of utter chaos continues as Helen smashes up the drinks cabinet - used so recently to lead to Cody’s (Bautista’s) death - and Bron's prize accomplishment, the un-tested alternative fuel, Klear, is released into the ventilation system. Knowing it is dangerous, knowing there is a fire in the drinks cabinet, we return to the Mona Lisa. Set up at the beginning of the film as the epitome of Bron’s vanity, narcissism and greed, there is a delicious slow-motion shot of Helen sprinting to disable the painting’s safety glass - and we see Bron’s ego burn to the ground, along with the Mona Lisa itself.

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Here again, we bow down to the gods of the cinematic release. A billionaire, profiting off of the work of others, acquiring a priceless object and promptly destroying it. Well, it may be too poetic to compare Twitter to the Mona Lisa, but the overwhelming atmosphere of the scene reminded me strongly of the chaos that erupted in the days after Musk took over the platform. Shitposting, general mayhem, and a sense that everyone will go down with the ship. When the characters of this film smashed the vases and vowed to testify in court in Helen’s favour, they would lose their funding and social status. We never see what happens, but we have seen their decision. When Twitter users shitposted - it was (and is) a form of digital protest. Changing their handles to joke @’s resulted in tanking the stock price of pharmaceutical company, Eli Lilly, and users' reactions to the many changes taking place on the platform have only increased the sense of chaos. In Glass Onion and in real life, we’re living in the ‘This is fine’ meme. The Greek island villa and the social media sphere is burning down around us.

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One thing I do love about the Knives Out Mysteries is the morality of Benoit Blanc. From defending Marta’s inheritance, to removing himself from the art room in the minutes before chaos erupts in Glass Onion, he is a massively supportive character to the heroines of each film. Who wouldn’t want him on your side when you’re in a pinch? For Helen, justice for Andi won’t come in the realm of the courts. Even if the ensemble do testify against Bron and accept they are going down for perjury, a courtroom wouldn’t deliver the same bite of revenge. So Blanc disappears, and let’s Helen get on with burning it all down - literally. It’s a mirror of Murder on the Orient Express. Poirot withdraws himself from that case, with the ‘jury’ of murderers getting away with the crime. In Glass Onion, Benoit Blanc himself hands Helen the Klear crystal, surely knowing she would use it to blow up the villa. There is no conflict here - he just does whatever is supportive to Helen.

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All round, the film is a masterclass. Rian Johnson reunites with long-time collaborators, cinematographer Steve Yedlin, and composer Nathan Johnson. A stunning location (Villa 20 by Aman Resorts, if 17 of my closest friends want to split the bill). An all-star cast who know exactly what character traits to hit, and how to interact with each other. Most of all, carried by excellent performances by Janelle Monáe and Daniel Craig.

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I’m going to go on one last tangent before I go; the score.

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Glass Onion, as the first, has a fantastic one. Soaring strings over sweeping shots of the glamorous Greek island immediately capture the summer breeze and high drama to follow. I often find myself listening back to film scores long after I watch a film. Knives Out is still one I go back to; listening to the score as the penny drops in ‘Blanc’s Tale Part II’ is a perfect culmination of the story. Glass Onion is destined to be added into the rotation. Sat in the cinema, there was an itch in the back of my brain every time we saw Janelle Monáe appear, accompanied by ‘Andi’s Theme’. It felt foreboding, like a funeral march. I was tense whenever she was on screen because oh no, Andi is going to die. And then the twists and turns twist that into oh no, Helen is going to die. And then it twists again. And then it clicks. The funerary tone of her theme comes from the fact that Andi was murdered before the film began. The whole story revolves around her sister finding justice- so of course the theme reminds me of Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’, a composition that has been compared to famous funeral marches. All through the film we are hearing Andi’s funeral- we just don’t know it yet. This is a level of filmmaking I love. Even the soundtrack provides a story that changes after you have watched the film.

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If my nearly 2000 words of rambling didn’t already make you want to see the film, I don’t know what will. But I will be first in line for the third Knives Out Mystery.