Knives Out Pulls A Fast One (Spoiler Alert)

Ryan Johnson may have pulled one of the biggest capers since Sixth Sense, and it is not what you think.

Major, major spoilers ahead. Do not read until you watch the film.

After watching Knives out, I have a theory. It hinges on one scene that I may not be remembering correctly (I saw it the night I wrote this). If I did see it correctly, then everything clicks, and the nurse Marta intentionally injected Harlan with morphine as she knew she would inherit the will.

After I saw the movie, something did not sit right with me. One was Marta’s little smirk at the end of the film. The second was the scene I think I remember seeing correctly, and the third was the baseball. A few other nagging details refused to fit.

The scene where Marta interjected Harlan with morphine instead of the second drug, which I will call ‘KE’ as I can only remember the first two letters, is significant. When Marta was looking for the antidote to the morphine, she dumped her bag. The camera did a quick close in of the two bottles that she had set down when she explained to Harlan that she had given him the wrong medicine. If my memory serves me correctly, the empty bottle was KE and not the morphine bottle.

If I remembered this scene correctly, this is significant for two reasons. First is the fact that Ransom switched the bottles. But Marta could not have known that. Benoit Blanc, the detective, proves later that Marta knows the difference between KE and morphine by sight. She would not have mixed the two up. Marta knew the KE bottle had morphine in it. Yet she still gave it to Harlan.

Now, if anyone knows for a fact that the empty bottle was the morphine bottle, stop reading and let me know I was wrong. But if it was the KE bottle that was empty, then director Rian Johnson has pulled a brilliant fast one on all of us.

Martha intentionally gave Harlan the morphine, knowing that Harlan would either cover for her or would die, and then she could make it look like a suicide. I think she played a safe bet; she knew him better than anyone. Ransom was an unexpected complication. She was not aware he had switched the bottles. She reached down and grabbed the one she wanted that night, the one with morphine in it.

Thus her conflict and tension when detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) showed up were genuine. She thought she had gotten away with the perfect murder. Suddenly a well-known detective was on the case. Not only that, he was keeping her close, and then Ransom started making things even more complicated.

What about the toxicology (blood report)? What about it? Benoit Blanc never said the lab report was why he thought she was innocent. Remember, he said it was a ‘bunch of numbers nobody could understand.’ Benoit was already suspicious that the medicines had were switched and suspicious of Ryan. When he stopped her confession, he was doing so because he had figured out who had hired him and why. Benoit never said that the toxicology report had shown that Harlan had no morphine. He said it would show that it had no morphine. As he indicated earlier, he didn’t know how to read it.

But Fran knew how to read it. Fran accused Ransom of injecting the morphine into his system because she saw him coming out of the room. Fran thought he did it. She had no idea that Marta had told Benoit and Ransom she had injected the morphine. I will get back to why that is the clincher shortly.

So Marta threads the needle with Ransom and Benoit and, in the end, gets what she wants, Harlan’s estate. So now we come to the other major problem with this conspiracy theory. How did she know that she was inheriting the estate? The baseball.

When Richard (Don Johnson) goes into Harlan’s office after the memorial and breaks into the desk drawer and finds the envelope for his wife that tells of his cheating, it’s blank. In his frustration, he takes the baseball and throws it out the window. We see it pop out the other side. The window does not shatter. The window to Harlan’s office was open. It was open the night Ransom (Chris Evans) was in an argument with Harlan after Harlan revealed he was giving his estate to Marta. On his way out, Ransom gives his desert to his Great Grandmother.

When Marta goes through the front door to enter the party, Harlan’s mother has the cake. Marta opened the front door after the argument with Ransom and Harlan. The party inside only heard the tail end of the debate when the shouting accord. Marta was on the front porch. She listened to the entire conversation, including the part where she inherited the estate. If I remember correctly, she entered in from the front side of the house, where Harlan’s office with the open window is situated.

Marta’s knowledge that she will get Harlan’s estate explains her attitude with Harlan after the party is over. She is in a rush to give him the meds. Now we know why.

The clincher for me is Marta’s inability to tell a lie. Even when she found out that Ransom had switched the medicine, she never once said she accidentally killed Harlan. Near the end, when she asked Benoit how he knew she was involved in Harlan’s killing. A prudent choice of words. Finally, the scene where she injects Harlan. She looked at both the bottles before telling him what happened and looking for the antidote. That’s when she said, ‘there must be some mistake.’ She couldn’t lie about that, and she wasn’t. The mistake was that the morphine was in the KE bottle. She had known it had morphine in it by the site of the liquid. If she had pulled the KE bottle and still and gone forward with the charade, she would have been lying and would have gotten ill.

So, is my conspiracy theory correct? Did I accurately remember the scene with the empty bottles? Am I merely off my rocker?

If I am correct, Ryan Johnson has pulled one for the ages.