‘Knives Out’ Is Actually a Fantasy, Not a Comedy
The Oscar-nominated film imagines a world where consequences exist for the privileged
After college, I moved to the tiny city of Sitka, Alaska, to work as a tutor at a local university. During the cold, dark, rainy winter months, you could find many of Sitka’s younger folks at weekend game nights. These were hosted by one of my coworkers, a mild-mannered fanatic with hundreds of games tucked away in cabinets. Some time has passed, but I still think about these enjoyable evenings anytime the mere suggestion of board games comes up, which is more often than you’d think: In just the past couple years, board games were at the center of at least two wide-release movies — 2018’s Game Night and 2019’s Ready or Not — and appeared briefly in a third, last year’s Knives Out.
In that last film (nominated this year for Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards), the death of acclaimed crime novelist Harlan Thrombey turns into a wild whodunit that unearths some of the unspoken tensions among Harlan, his family, and his house staff. Amid the movie’s many twists and turns, a board game is featured in a crucial flashback scene. Moments before Harlan’s death, he and his nurse, Marta Cabrera, are playing their customary nightly game of Go. We later find out that only Marta and Harlan’s…
