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‘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 grandson, Ransom, were ever able to beat Harlan at Go — a fact that foreshadows their clash at the film’s climax.
The symbolism is not meant to be subtle. Throughout the rest of the movie, the word “game” is thrown around, often figuratively and in reference to Harlan’s motives. The first mention goes to Linda, Harlan’s daughter, who says while being interviewed by the police, “We had our own secret way of communicating. You had to find that with dad. You had to find a game to play with him.” Later, before the memorial service, Linda shrewdly observes, “I was just thinking about Dad’s games. This all feels like one.”
To see this inheritance plot as a “game” is to obscure the consequences.
In college, I learned that my white and wealthy peers would turn any semi-impactful decision — the election of a new editor at our school paper, for instance — into a small battle…
