105 Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022)
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery and Disrupting the Status Quo
By Scarlett Walter
When I first watched Rian Johnson’s Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, I found it entertaining—clever, even—but I also felt somewhat let down. It doesn’t follow the typical murder mystery formula, and it ends on a rather anticlimactic note. At that time, if I had read longtime film critic Christy Lemire’s review of the film, I might have agreed that “ultimately…the giant glass onion that rests atop Miles’ mansion [is] an all-too-apt metaphor for the movie as a whole: sparkling, but empty.” But after watching it a second time, over a year later, I couldn’t disagree more. In the simplest of terms, it’s a film about how the elite aren’t any smarter than the rest of us; but that scarcely scratches the surface. The real genius of Glass Onion is that it sells its audience a story that seems to match up with real life—and then shatters the very truths the story, and our perception of reality, is built upon.
The film starts off by immediately introducing its main cast of characters, as each of them receive a large box in the mail. Claire, a politician campaigning for Senate on environmentally friendly grounds; Lionel, a gifted scientist and yes-man to tech billionaire Miles Bron; Birdie, a controversial fashion designer and influencer; and Duke, a men’s rights influencer/Twitch streamer, all hop on a joint phone call once they discover the package is from Miles Bron. The aforementioned tech billionaire and dear friend to all of them is known to send the invitations to his exotic, annual weekend getaways via unconventional means, and this time is no different. The boxes turn out to be made up of puzzles that, as they are solved, unfold the box to eventually reveal the invitation at its center. Only, one recipient doesn’t let it unfold. She doesn’t get on the call with everyone else, and we don’t know her name. We simply see her sit and stare at the perfectly smooth, wooden cube for a while before getting a hammer and smashing it open—foreshadowing what is to come. Benoit Blanc, world-famous detective and star of the original Knives Out (2019), also receives a box.
When the invitees arrive in Greece to await Miles’ yacht, which will take them to his private island for what he declared a murder mystery-themed weekend, they are surprised by Blanc’s presence, considering his lack of connection to Miles. At this point, we as the audience are also not sure why Blanc was invited, but, like the rest of the group (which includes Birdie’s personal assistant Peg and Duke’s Instagram model girlfriend Whiskey) we are left to conclude he must be part of the murder mystery game that is to take place over the weekend. The group is completely blown away, though, by the arrival of one final guest. The woman we saw break open the box with a hammer looks different now: different hair color and style, straighter posture, nicer clothing. We learn her name—Andi—and that Miles recently cut her out of Alpha, the tech company they co-founded a decade ago, in a highly publicized court case. “Social Networked her”, as Lionel put it when explaining the situation to Blanc. So, the question we are left with is: why on earth would she show up?
As it turns out—she didn’t. About halfway through the second act, the film takes us back to the day Blanc received his wooden box. Before, we assumed it was delivered like all the others, but this flashback reveals it wasn’t UPS who dropped it off, it was Helen—Andi’s twin sister. The plot is quickly turned on its head as we learn that Andi was actually found dead in her home two days prior; and that the day she died she had sent an email to Claire, Duke, Lionel, and Birdie, threatening to release a piece of information that would “burn [Miles’] whole empire down” with an attached photo of her holding a red envelope. Not only that, but the red envelope seemingly vanished with Andi’s last breath. Based on this, Helen is certain that her sister didn’t commit suicide, but that she was murdered by one of the Disruptors (as they like to call themselves). Blanc agrees to help her find out who did it, on the condition that she comes with him as Andi to fend off suspicion—and just like that, the narrative we thought we were following for the first half of the film is completely recontextualized, and the real fun begins.
Well, “fun” might not be the best descriptor for those involved. The plan is dangerous. As Blanc warns Helen from the start, “From the moment you arrive on that island, the killer will know who you are and what you’re doing.” And (spoiler alert) when it is eventually discovered that the killer is Miles Bron himself, the situation’s grim power dynamic also comes to light. Put in the plainest terms possible, it’s literally Black, female, working-class school teacher versus white, male, tech billionaire. He’s the top 1%; she’s exactly the kind of person the top 1% tells us has zero chance of changing anything. It would be foolish to try—just look at what happened to Andi. Miles’ status alone is proof that he’s not one to be messed with, since everyone knows that you need an extraordinary intellect, an unbeatable work ethic, and a uniquely creative mindset in order to achieve that level of success. And for most of the film, Miles is portrayed as the definition of success. He has a private island; he displays his baby blue Porsche on a revolving rooftop platform; he has the literal, actual Mona Lisa displayed in his island mansion’s living room. And he’s days away from announcing the launch of Klear, a new type of hydrogen fuel that, he assures the Disruptors, will revolutionize the global energy industry.
But what first appear to be signs of Miles’ intelligence and ingenuity gradually coalesce into a very different picture of the tech giant. He may be a co-founder of Alpha, but Andi’s the one who scribbled the company’s founding idea on a napkin ten years ago. Far from being an inventor, Miles first heard about Klear at a remote ayahuasca retreat and immediately became obsessed—to the point where his entire island runs on the stuff—despite Lionel warning him that several years of scientific testing are needed to determine whether or not the substance is safe. When Andi refused to let him use her share of the company to fund the launch of Klear, he responded by cutting her out of Alpha completely; and when she sued, he produced a forged replica of the original napkin, in his own handwriting, and had the Disruptors lie on the stand to back him up. That’s why he was so threatened by the red envelope—or rather, what it contained: the actual, original napkin, which Andi had found tucked between the pages of a book. In other words, Miles isn’t a genius. He’s a coward and a fraud.
But he does know how to manipulate others’ perceptions. And this is where the brilliance of Glass Onion starts to become clear. When Miles says in reference to the glass sphere on top of his house—“This simple thing you thought you were looking at takes on layers and depth so complex they give you vertigo”—we automatically assume the film is giving us a hint about Miles’ motivations. However, by the end of it, we realize the opposite is true. The layers we thought were concealing Miles’ true character turn out to be part of it. As Natalie Zutter notes in her Den of Geek article, “[H]e has surrounded himself with impressive people and breathtaking art to obscure his own utter ordinariness. He would be nothing without these people…but somehow he has twisted reality so that each of them believes they would be nothing without him.”
But even though I’ve spent half of this essay talking about Miles, I have come to the conclusion that Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery isn’t about him. It’s not a “girlboss movie”, either, despite the fact that Helen gets her revenge in spectacular fashion by using a marble-sized chunk of Klear to blow up Miles’ mansion, destroying the Mona Lisa in the process and finally convincing the Disruptors to turn against him. No—there is still one final layer to peel back.
I believe that at its core, the film is about the truth a lot of people have yet to realize: the United States is not a meritocracy. The richest of the rich did not get to where they are because they are any more deserving than the rest of us, and they are not invincible. In fact, a great deal of their power is built on the lie that they deserve their position in society, and we deserve ours—and that the only way for us to get out of this situation is to work really, really hard in the hopes that maybe, someday, we too might get to be part of the elite. Helen refuses to play by Miles’ rules, and thus is able to destroy the so-called indestructible status quo, and turn the once-powerful into the powerless. She is able to see past the layers—i.e., her own biases and assumptions about power, difference, and oppression—to the central truth that is: no one is immune to disruption.
References
Lemire, Christy. “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery.” RogerEbert.com, Ebert Digital LLC, 23 Dec 2022, https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/glass-onion-a-knives-out-mystery-2022. Accessed 18 March 2025.
Pillar of Garbage. “Glass Onion’s One True Disruptor.” Www.youtube.com, 6 Jan. 2023, www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xOBJ9pEQE0. Accessed 18 Mar. 2025.
Zutter, Natalie. “Glass Onion Peels Back Myth of Genius Billionaires.” Den of Geek, 26 Dec 2022, www.denofgeek.com/movies/glass-onion-peels-back-myth-of-genius-billionaires/. Accessed 18 Mar 2025.
