Let’s Talk About the Ending of ‘Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery’

The wait is over and now audiences are seeing Glass Onion and experiencing the magic that is the second Rian Johnson film in the Knives Out franchise. A perfect movie (you can read my review for it here) and exactly the kind of second outing for Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc that I wanted, the movie has a lot of moving parts.

It is, after all, a Rian Johnson whodunnit. But let’s talk about the ending of Glass Onion and what it means.

**Spoilers for Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery lie ahead**

As we moved through the mystery of Miles Bron (Edward Norton) and his “murder” mystery party, we got to see just how far he would go to remain in power of his company. But as Benoit Blanc says when he’s solving the case, everything about it is just so stupid. Once he figures out the “murder weapon” used to kill Duke Cody (Dave Bautista) was just Cody’s own pineapple allergy, Benoit Blanc gets to just rant about how fake Miles Bron is, and how he took every opportunity to show off that fact throughout their visit.

Bron made up words, killed his friend, and was showing everyone who he truly was. It took Blanc and Helen (Janelle Monáe) calling him out for killing her sister Andi (also Monáe) for it to really become apparent just how deep into his own nonsense Bron was.

Blanc lists off everything that happened, everything Bron has done. But since his evidence is burned, he knows that they will not get Bron in jail on their own. (That’s where his jurisdiction ends.) So in her anger, Helen destroys everything in Bron’s “Glass Onion” and burns it to the ground, using the incredibly flammable natural energy resource Bron has spent the whole film pushing. So at least Helen has killed any chance of that happening, taking away Bron’s future revenue and essentially killing his reputation.

She also manages to burn up the Mona Lisa, which Bron had the hubris of “renting” to display in his island home, essentially granting his wish that he (as the creator of the material that caused the fire) would always be mentioned in the same breath as the famous painting.

After they escape the fire, as Blanc leaves all the “friends” sitting on the stairs of Bron’s home, each character begins to talk about how they saw the napkin that proved that Andi was really the one who came up with the idea for Bron’s company, effectively telling us that they’d be willing to stand up in court and say that the truth about Bron’s life of fraud.

What was the song that played during the credits?

One of the first things I thought about when I heard the title of the movie was the song “Glass Onion” by the Beatles. The song itself was named to send a sort of “relax” message to fans who looked too much into the titles of their songs. So I thought that maybe that would relate to the movie. And, in a way, it does.

The movie is called Glass Onion because that was the name of the bar that Miles and his friends all met at. So … it’s really that simple. Sometimes the answers are right on the surface, as Blanc learns, to his great frustration. But at the end of the movie, hearing The Beatles’ “Glass Onion” play over the credits delighted me to no end.

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Now that Glass Onion is out, I can’t wait for everyone’s theories to discuss what we think the next movie is going to be about!

(image: Netflix)