'Knives Out' a cut above the rest

It's striking sometimes how fast you can tell that a movie is worth watching and that a director knows what he's doing. Case in point: "Knives Out."

We begin with a view of an old mansion, like something you'd see in an adaptation of an Agatha Christie novel. Then the camera moves inside, and we follow it into rooms and down corridors. The set decoration is notably detailed. It's rugs on top of rugs, all expensive. Everywhere are rich patterns and textures, and odd objects, all of which combine to convey an impression of eccentricity, taste and wealth.

We see a housemaid balancing objects on a tray. She opens the door to a room, and there we see what she sees: Her employer is dead. He is reclining on a couch with his throat slit. Cut to her reaction: She almost drops the tray, but then catches herself — the teapot and cup wobbles, but they don't fall.

By then I knew "Knives Out" was going to be a good.

Did you catch the decisive clue, that telling detail that any master detective of quality movies would have seized on instantly? It was the maid's reaction.

A hundred years of feature films have prepared us for the maid to drop the tray. A hundred years of clichés have told director Rian Johnson that that is the default move for that scene. Yet he resisted, even in a movie like this — a satire of the sort of film in which maids do drop trays. He stayed attentive, found the truth of the moment, and if he found the truth for that moment, I knew he'd keep finding it.

Johnson also wrote the screenplay for "Knives Out," something you might guess just from watching it. The terms and strategies of plot and storytelling are so specific here that they practically had to be implemented by the person who'd imagined them.

For example, "Knives Out" is a whodunit — sort of...