The Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery Ending Is a Case of Brilliant Simplicity

While we understand M. Blanc’s despair over the stupidity of our culture, for once we have to grit our teeth and agree with Birdie Jay. It is kind of brilliant… if as a metaphor instead of an intricate plan for murder.

As the title suggests, Glass Onion is a glaringly transparent story that through layers of distraction and refracted light obfuscates the emptiness within. And to the credit of Johnson’s script—some might even say its brilliance—it takes until the ending for most viewers to recognize the empty suit at its core: the murderous billionaire Miles Bron (Edward Norton).

The wealthy tech guru’s idiocy is never obscured, at least when he’s onscreen. In the first scene Norton is on-set, his character incorrectly uses the word “abbreviate” while welcoming his old friends and Blanc to his private Greek island. Admittedly, I missed that as I was distracted by the sunny opulence of his wealth in the Aegean Sea. However, I caught other times he misspoke shortly afterwards, including when he referred to the Aegean as “the Ionian Sea” and when he misused the word “reclamation,” and referred to Benoit Blanc as “the pre-definite detective” instead of saying “preeminent.”

Watching all of those context clues in a movie theater, where it was impossible to rewind and pause to ruminate on the little miscues, I let them fly by as quirks of character—an accepted anomaly in the mythology we build around so many real-life tech billionaires for being “eccentric,” “idiosyncratic,” or just plain odd. After all, before any of these scenes, we were told time and gain that Miles is a genius.

The first scene of the movie, in fact, is Lionel Toussaint (Leslie Odom Jr.) repeating that time and again, almost as if it were an article of faith. One of the unspecified Alpha board members even counters, “This is science, not a religion!”

And yet, what we see afterward isn’t a dull debate over the ethics of an unnamed invention but a wildly intricate puzzle box sent by Miles to Lionel. At a glance, it’s apparent this was designed by a brilliant mind… only we’re asked to ponder later in the movie whether that brilliant mind ever belonged to Miles. Consider this: When he first meets Blanc on his island, Miles literally tells Benoit that “I don’t like to toot my own horn but…” the murder mystery game he designed for the weekend is maddeningly difficult. Not only does Benoit then solve it inside of two minutes, but he also discovers Miles paid novelist Gillian Flynn for its planning!