Like any good victim, Thrombey's New England manor house comes complete with creepy statuary, front and back gates with outdated security systems and ladder trellises capable of handling the weight of a human or two. The victim here is one Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer), millionaire mystery writer extraordinaire, who is discovered with his throat slashed in his own study. Enter detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig). Set in 2019 in Massachusetts, this story, with its smartphones and SUVs, is nearly a full century removed from Poirot’s debut in 1921’s “The Mysterious Affair at Styles.” But the conditions of modern-day America turn out to mirror those of Christie’s time, even though Christie would assuredly be unable to decipher a line like: “I read a tweet about a New Yorker article about you!” America, like Great Britain one hundred years ago, is an empire in its waning years, with casual millionaires and servants hired under the guise of being “home healthcare aides.” Now all we need is an eccentric outsider detective able to see through the assumptions of the privileged. This is why “Knives Out” is such a revelation. Even in cases where the adaptation ages things (such as “The ABC Murders,” which aired on the BBC in 2018), the story is still treated as a period piece. And her endings have become the stuff of parody, as the detective gathers all the suspects into a drawing room and lays out the case point by point, with the murderer cheerfully sitting among them until the final reveal.īecause of this formula, and the traditions it relied on, many recent adaptations have found it easiest to stay in the past. Her most famous detectives, Hercules Poirot and Miss Marple, were characters dependent on the assumptions and snobberies of the time, able to observe what others couldn’t because of their outsider status.
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