Hidden in the new Knives Out mystery is a ton of secret symbolism and sly details
that predict the many twists and turns. Yippee-ki-yay, movie lovers, I'm Jan,
and in this video I'm peeling back every layer of Glass Onion to reveal
all the clues you might have missed. Spoilers ahead, of course, so take care.
By the end of the movie, Miles has been exposed as Andi and Duke's killer, so Helen
– Andi's twin sister – takes revenge by smashing up his art,
setting the place on fire, and destroying one of the world's most famous paintings, the Mona Lisa.
However, in a clever bit of foreshadowing the details of this big moment were laid
out much earlier when Miles explained the type of person he considered a disruptor:
If you want to shake things up, you start with something small, you break a norm, or an idea.
Notice how Helen was paying attention to Miles during his little speech,
and she basically followed his script, starting with smaller pieces of glass,
which stirs up Whiskey and some of the others… Everybody gets excited because you're
busting up something that everyone wanted broken in the first place.
… then she moves onto bigger pieces like his Liberace piano that Miles
actually begins to care about… Will you break more things?
Break bigger things? … and then she turns to the Mona Lisa, the thing
that everyone in the room begs her not to ruin. Are you willing to break the thing
that nobody wants you to break? Because at that point, people are not going to
be on your side, they're going to call you crazy. And Miles of course tries to stop her...
They're going to tell you to stop. Nobody wants you to break the system itself.
But that is what true disruption is. Helen also mocks his gesture about
crossing the line, employing it just before she actually crosses the line,
truly disrupting his world and sending his empire based on fakery and lies up in smoke.
We all got to that line and crossed it. Disruptors.
By the way, the finale was also foreshadowed when Helen received the puzzle box intended for her
sister Andi, and rather than playing along with Miles's game, she smashed it open, destroying it
but at the same time solving the box's mystery. And I think there's a nice parallel here between
Helen and Marta from the first movie who also refused to play the game by the rules
You won, not by playing the game Harlan's way, but yours.
Another clever clue comes via the murder mystery game that Miles organised for the weekend.
The way Miles is shot with a dart that bursts open a pouch of fake blood under his shirt telegraphs
how when he shoots Helen later, she'll use Jeremy Renner's hot sauce to pretend to be dead.
Another clue that Helen hadn't really died, was that Blanc wouldn't let anyone go near her
supposedly dead body. Shouldn't we?
She's not going anywhere. And the way Miles hides the
diamond he stole from Birdie in plain sight in the necklace he puts on for the evening,
replicates how he also hid Andi's red envelope in plain sight behind the fake napkin in his office.
It also transpires that Miles didn't even come up with the mystery himself like he originally
claimed, but instead hired author Gillian Flynn to write it, in a similar way to how he
took credit for Andi's original business idea. And the shout-out to Flynn, who's most famous
for her book and screenplay of Gone Girl, could be another nod to the fact that later Helen is
actually only pretending to be dead. One of the biggest clues that there was
something suspicious about Miles was the look of absolute shock on his face when he saw Andi
turn up on his private island, as after all he knew he'd poisoned her just days earlier.
Andi. You're here.
I imagine Miles didn't know Andi had a twin, so he must have thought she'd
survived the poisoning, especially as news hadn't broken yet about her death.
And I think the way he weirdly touches her shoulder after she arrives could be that he
was checking to see if she was actually real and not just a figment of his imagination or a ghost.
I really am glad you're here. Interestingly, Claire was perhaps
the only one who sensed early on there was something odd about fake Andi.
Something's off. She's changed.
There's some delicious secret symbolism in the names of twin sisters Andi and Helen.
Andi is short for Cassandra, who in Greek mythology had the gift of prophecy but
was cursed to never be believed, and she also had a twin sibling called Helenus.
And we see all this play out in the movie as Andi warned Miles that his Klear hydrogen
technology was dangerous and would end up causing a disaster, which comes true
in the finale. Hindenburg.
Also like her Greek counterpart, nobody believed Andi in court when she sued
Miles stating she was the one who came up with the original idea for Alpha.
Additionally, in the Greek myths, Cassandra predicted that the arrival of Helen of Sparta in
Troy would lead to the destruction of the city, similar to how the arrival of Helen on Miles's
private island eventually leads to his downfall. Like the Trojan Horse which Greek myth's Cassandra
warned about, Helen and Blanc infiltrate Miles's abode and destroy it from within.
And a clever little detail pointing to Andi's secret twin is the mug we see her drinking
from at home which has the two-faced head of the Roman god Janus as its design, and given that this
particular god is associated with beginnings, the mug's design is doubly appropriate for
Andi as she was the true originator of Alpha. Blanc's undercover role was also foreshadowed when
he first appears and he's in the middle of the game "Among Us", playing the role of an Imposter.
In "Among Us", one of the major objectives for Imposters is to sabotage the mission,
and in Glass Onion, Helen – another imposter
– triumphs by destroying Miles's treasures and legacy, and fellow
imposter Blanc helps her get the means to do it. By the way, Blanc accidentally gave away that
fake Andi wasn't who she appeared to be when he called her 'Helen' momentarily in the aftermath
of Duke's death. Helen.
Did you take Duke's gun? And that's before we knew who she really was.
The Omega symbol is a recurring motif in the movie appearing on Miles's superyacht, deckchairs on the
boat, dressing gowns, and the Omega brand watch. And Miles's business empire
runs under the banner "Alpha". The Alpha and Omega is one of the names used for
Christ or God in the Book of Revelation and points to how Miles sees himself as a god-like figure.
The two symbols are also the first and last letters in the Greek alphabet, which relates to
how the movie chronicles the beginning of Miles's business empire when it was first conceived with
the idea he stole from Andi, to the end of his reign when Helen torches his world to the ground.
You can also see an allusion to the beginning and end in Andi's room,
via a painting of an ouroboros – a snake eating its own tail.
It's here where Andi discovers the original napkin with the business plan, a moment which
references both the beginning and – then with the red envelope
– the end for Miles and for Andi as he kills her over it.
When Helen draws up her suspect chart for who might have killed her sister,
she writes Miles's name right next to the column headers for "Motive" and "Opportunity", rather
than on a separate line like she does for everyone else, a subtle clue that Miles is the real killer
and that they've overlooked that fact. When Helen points out that the grid looks
a little like a game card from Clue, and comments that Blanc must be good at the game, he replies…
I'm very bad at dumb things. My Achilles' heel.
Ticking boxes, running around, searching all the rooms.
It's just a terrible, terrible game. Blanc doesn't realise yet, but it ends
up that to solve the Glass Onion mystery, Helen in fact has to do all of those things:
tick boxes; and run around searching the rooms on the
island until she finds the hidden red envelope. As Blanc points out, dumb, simple mysteries are
his Achilles heel, and so he dismisses the most obvious suspect when Helen suggests it
Miles Bron is not an idiot. The risk of committing murder after
a very public court case with the possibility of that email of Andi's coming to light would
be an exceedingly stupid thing to do. And another hint that the answer to the
mystery will be a simple one comes when Blanc comments to Miles…
I like the glass onion as a metaphor, an object that seems densely layered, vv
There's another clue to where the evidence for Andi's murder is hiding right at the
beginning of the movie when Duke receives the puzzle box and his mother tells him…
That first one's a Fibonacci sequence. Of course, the Fibonacci spiral in the
box is very similar to the one at the centre of Miles's office,
behind which the red envelope is hidden. Now, this one might be a little stretch, but
I think that, as well as being necessary to the puzzle itself, the missing square in the N of the
puzzle box with its red background is also a hint to the see-through glass or hole in the Fibonacci
spiral and the red envelope behind that. Interestingly, the giant chandelier above Miles's
dining table with little red squares in among the white lights could be both a nod to the red
envelope and to his Klear hydrogen rock. Another of the puzzles has a
cheeky hint to Miles's idiocy. The chessboard layout and checkmate
move that Claire makes to unlock the next level is called the "Fool's Mate" and is the quickest and
most foolish way a player can lose in chess. It requires that the player going first,
make the worst possible opening two moves, a clue to how Miles gives himself
away to Blanc in the most obvious manner. It hides not behind complexity, but behind
mind-numbing, obvious clarity. It doesn't hide at all.
I was staring right at it. After Duke discovers the truth
about Andi's death and makes the deal with Miles to get himself on Alpha News,
notice how he deliberately hides his phone from Birdie when she wants to see what's going on.
And there was a little clue that there was something happening in the rest of the world,
when Claire's husband called her a few moments earlier presumably to tell her about Andi,
but she decided to ignore his call. There's a little hint to Miles's penchant
for killing his enemies via spiked beverages when he says to Blanc…
I apologize. I don't know your drink,
but, you know, pick your poison. After Duke dies, his phone keeps pinging,
so Blanc goes to look for it. Where's Duke's phone?
It just dinged. It must be here.
Miles backs off nervously at this point, not because he's scared of
being murdered as he claims, but because he's already stolen the phone to stop anyone
discovering the breaking news about Andi's death. And if you stop and look really closely here, you
can spot a phone poking out of his back pocket. This has to be Duke's as we already know the
billionaire doesn't use a phone himself, and instead has fax machines send him messages.
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My next video will be all the easter eggs you might have missed in Glass Onion,
which I'll link to here as soon as it's ready. So, how do you think the sequel compares to
the first Knives Out? And did you spot any
other interesting details or clues? Let me know in the comments below.
Tap here for my next Knives Out video, and if you enjoyed this one,
do leave a thumbs-up, I really appreciate it. Thanks for enjoying Glass Onion with me and hope
you have a marvellous movie-loving week! Yippee-ki-yay, movie lovers!