Rian Johnson – he just can’t help himself. Surprises aren’t always warmly received, but in a whodunit that requires our minds to twist and turn, Knives Out is the perfect vehicle for someone who was not so long ago getting lambasted for trying to subvert our expectations too damn much.

Wealthy mystery novel writer Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer) is found by his housekeeper one morning, lying on the couch with his throat slit in his study. Detective Elliot (LaKeith Stanfield) has ruled it a suicide, but renowned private investigator Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) isn’t so convinced after receiving an unmarked envelope stuffed full of money asking him to solve the case. At stake: the Thrombey family fortune, which includes the rights to Harlan’s works, a production company, tons of money and a creaky Massachusetts mansion that his family members (read: suspects) all live in. Blanc enlists the help of Thrombey’s nurse and closest confidante, Marta Cabrera (Ana de Armas), who has a peculiar talent: “a regurgitative reaction to mis-truthing,” which is such a clever turn of phrase from Blanc that I’ll be repeating this exact line whenever I’m fed something less than perfectly true and pretend to gag.

Given the facts, Johnson takes his audience on a 130-minute journey that never feels boring. When Blanc nears a conclusion, or when the timeline starts falling into place, Johnson keeps throwing you curveballs; like a game of Clue, the movie constantly cycles through various scenarios of who, what, when and how, and systematically moves through each of them before settling on its conclusion.

If we’re finding faults with Knives Out, we’d end up nitpicking. Its conclusion is more about watching Craig ham it up with a bonus extended version of his Southern accent from Logan Lucky, a 20-minute monologue that makes parallels between donut holes and the missing pieces of the mystery, while also discussing a treatise on how the purest heart always wins and some sort of social commentary about white privilege. At several points throughout the film, none of the Thrombey family members really remember where Marta is from, who is at one point said to be from Ecuador and at another point from Venezuela.

The film is original in the sense that we’ve never seen these characters nor heard of this story prior to its release, but it still falls back on a lot of mystery crime thriller tropes. Nearly all the characters are caricatures, just updated into their aughts forms: spoiled trust fund kid Ransom Drysdale (Chris Evans), bigoted patriarch Richard Drysdale (Don Johnson), wacko health guru Joni Thrombey (Toni Collette), ambitious younger brother Walt (Michael Shannon), liberal arts college student and all-round SJW Meg Thrombey (Katherine Langford) and teenaged internet troll Jacob Thrombey (Jaeden Martell). There’s plenty of mix-ups, and even a secret entrance into the house that unsurprisingly becomes an important plot point.

The film is very self-aware, choosing to lampoon its own genre tropes and mistakes. It’s a defensive move, but when executed well it comes off as genuine and natural. When Detective Elliot emerges from his car after a short car chase sequence through a small town and remarks “what a terrible car chase” it was, I couldn’t help but burst out and laugh. The inclusion of a straight shooter – Marta and her puking reflex, not Blanc’s keen intellect – helps keeps the audience centered because the genre demands nearly all of its characters to be unreliable narrators, yet even with her inclusion we’re still not quite sure of all the facts until the film’s final moments.

The answers are there if you watch closely enough, but they’re so well-hidden upon initial viewing because you’re in constant awe of how Knives Out can keep track of everything, yet bring it back so that it all makes sense. That’s the sign of a great whodunit.

Knives Out gets four stars out of four.