Warning! Spoilers ahead for Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery.

Netflix has scored one of its biggest hits of the year with Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, as audiences have been tuning in to Rian Johnson’s latest whodunit over the holiday season. With twins, pineapple juice, and napkin forgery wrapped up in the plot, Benoit Blanc’s latest case has proven to be just as taut, tense, and twist-filled as his last. While Glass Onion is a standalone sequel with no narrative connections to the original Knives Out, it does continue Johnson’s unique deconstruction of the familiar murder mystery format. It has another stellar performance by Daniel Craig, another star-studded ensemble of suspects, and another intricately constructed genre cocktail with a suspense thriller baked into a whodunit.

Both Knives Out movies lie to their audience – not just about who the killer is, but about the setup of the plot. In the first Knives Out movie, Marta Cabrera fights to clear her name when renowned crime novelist Harlan Thrombey is apparently killed by a mix-up with his medication. In the second one, Miles Bron invites his friends to a murder mystery party and begins to suspect that one of them is plotting to murder him for real. In both cases, those initial assertions turn out to be completely untrue as Blanc blows the case wide open and reveals twists that the audience never anticipated.

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Glass Onion more or less follows the same formula as the original as it assembles a cast of hilariously unlikable characters, kills off one of them, and leaves Blanc to figure out who’s responsible. The sequel swaps out a mansion for an island paradise, swaps out the extended family of a famed author for the disruptive friends of a tech billionaire, and swaps out an underappreciated nurse for a disgruntled former business partner and her equally disgruntled twin sister. Once again, Blanc teams up with a suspect to draw a confession out of the real killer, and once again, good triumphs over evil in a thrilling finale.

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Although they’ve been billed and marketed as such, the Knives Out films aren’t straightforward whodunits. Both Knives Out movies have the setup and resolution of a classic whodunit, starting with a murder and a room full of people who could’ve committed the crime, and ending with a Poirot-style “J’accuse!” monologue explaining who did the killing, why they did it, and how they pulled it off. But in their second acts, they have the engine of a Hitchcockian suspense thriller.

A standard whodunit will open with a murder and beg its namesake question: who done it? But Johnson’s whodunits beg all kinds of questions. The opening scene of Knives Out gives audiences the impression that they already know who the killer is. It seems that Marta has killed Harlan by accident and he’s given her a few hints to evade the cops. At the beginning of the movie, the dramatic question driving the story isn’t who killed Harlan; it’s, “How is Marta going to get away with accidentally killing Harlan?” However, it becomes clear throughout the second act that that’s not the whole picture. Marta didn’t kill Harlan; she was set up.

Glass Onion has a similar rug-pull with the questions its story asks. The question posed at the beginning of Glass Onion is, “Who is trying to kill Miles?” But shortly after Duke is killed, seemingly by accident after drinking from Miles’ glass, Miles’ ex-business partner Andi is shot and killed by an unseen gunman. Then, the movie goes back in time to reveal that it’s not really Andi, and when it comes back to the present, it turns out she’s not really dead – and the murder that Blanc is investigating already happened long before Miles invited his friends to his private island. Suffice to say, it’s far from a traditional murder mystery.

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Most whodunit novels tell their stories chronologically, but with the magic of cross-cutting, Johnson has the freedom to explore nonlinear narratives in his cinematic Knives Out mysteries. Johnson withholds key pieces of information until he starts jumping all over the timeline. When Blanc is sent to Miles’ island in Glass Onion, Johnson conceals the fact that he didn’t get an official invitation. He leads the audience to believe that the party guest who yells at everyone, ransacks the house, and then gets shot is Andi, but reveals that it’s really Andi’s twin sister Helen posing as her in a bid to solve her murder. Both Knives Out films apply the “Rashomon effect” to show scenes from multiple perspectives. Johnson goes back to Blanc’s first scene in the film to reveal that Helen is the one who recruited him to come to the island.

Johnson is contracted to make a third Knives Out movie for Netflix, and he recently told Deadline he’ll be starting on the threequel straight away: “The most exciting creative thing to me right now is that third movie, and so I think I’m going to hop right into it.” There’s no official release date for Knives Out 3, but fans can expect it to be just as subversive and deconstructive as its two predecessors, with a whodunit setup paving the way for a thriller storyline.

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