Childhood, that territory of silent pacts and intuitive loyalties, builds emotional structures resilient to the wear of time. Even when life’s paths push individuals into isolated compartments, some primal bonds continue to reverberate like stubborn frequencies on a forgotten radio dial. This residual energy — indecipherable without a mixture of nostalgia and instinct — finds no echo in the characters of Rian Johnson’s second dive into his stylized crime universe. The thread that links them doesn’t stem from a shared past or visceral communion, but from the shared frivolity of bored millionaires, sealed off within their narcissistic delusions. Here, the mystery is less about crime and more about what hides beneath the façade — and in exposing it, Johnson crafts a critique laced with venom and irony.
Drawing on a Beatles song that doubles as metaphor and mockery, the filmmaker works like a polisher of surfaces: what seems transparent is, in truth, deceptive. The layers stack like filters on a lens that reveals only the grotesque. Rather than merely pay tribute to Agatha Christie, Johnson stretches the genre she defined, smashing its codes with playful delight and acidic wit. Instead of relying on the classic “whodunit,” he disrupts the tempo of revelation and spreads discordant pieces across a board where coherence is built through estrangement. The result is a thriller that moves with the ease of a comedy of manners and the weight of an unflinching social satire, upending expectations at every turn.
Detective Benoît Blanc — increasingly removed from caricature and closer to a reinvented icon — finds himself entangled in a plot unconcerned with simulating realism. He is not merely a solver of puzzles, but a catalyst for dissonance. Surrounded by characters seemingly designed for ridicule — and yet alarmingly plausible — Blanc becomes a beacon of clarity amidst the madness. In this setting, Kate Hudson’s portrayal of the socialite Birdie Jay reaches a level of alienation that transcends the comedic: she’s a fraud so precisely constructed that she embodies a very modern type — one who performs empathy while stacking up gaffes and setting the world on fire as if lighting birthday candles.
Janelle Monáe, on the other hand, injects a sense of justice that momentarily threatens the reign of frivolity. Her character, Cassandra Brand, is not just an outlier among the fakers: she’s a living memory that insists on resurfacing buried traumas, a moral device dismantling façades with her sharp and unwavering gaze. Around her, secrets aren’t hidden — they’re celebrated — until someone with something real to lose shifts the game into open conflict. Johnson understands this kind of tension well, and navigates it deftly, never letting gravity extinguish the humor — even when that humor leaves a metallic aftertaste.
Despite its uneven pacing and occasional bloated segments, the narrative sustains the viewer in a state of curious anticipation. Its extended runtime, rather than a definitive misstep, becomes fuel for paranoid speculation, stretching the pleasure of discomfort and turning the viewing itself into a game. If there’s a miscalculation to be noted, it may lie in the balance of cleverness, which sometimes teeters on the edge of self-indulgence. But even that feels intentional, as if Johnson were reminding us that crime, at its core, is just another performance in a world where truth holds less currency than spectacle.
In this meticulously constructed artifice, what remains for the viewer is suspicion — not about who killed whom, but about how much of ourselves still hides behind the masks we choose to wear. And it is at this point that “Glass Onion” transcends mere entertainment: by portraying a group who gambles with human lives like disposable pieces on a luxury game board, the film forces us to confront the moral elasticity of our time — a time dressed in glamour and soaked in indifference. The real mystery, ultimately, isn’t the murder itself: it’s the ease with which we accept the absurd.
Film: Glass Onion
Director: Rian Johnson
Year: 2022
Genres: Comedy/Crime/Mystery/Thriller
Rating: 9/10