Whodunit (contraction de “who has done it“, in other words “that he has done“): originally a literary genre, it has also become a successful cinematographic subgenre. But who killed Harry? (1955) by the tyrannical Alfred Hitchcock, Witness for the Prosecution (1957) (recently adapted in series) or The crime of the Orient Express (1974), to name but a few. French directors have also tried their hand at it, notably with the trilogy directed by Catherine Frot and André Dussolier (My little finger told me, Crime is our business, Partners Against Crime) or The Mystery of the Yellow Room (2003). A big fan of this police sub-genre, which follows an investigation during which it is a question of determining the culprit of a crime, revealed at the very end, Rian Johnson also gets involved in 2019 with At loggerheads, a jubilant Cluedo. With a specific reference in mind: “This film is entirely inspired by Agatha Christie. Of my love for his work“, he summed up. And obviously, he did not draw his inspiration only from the novelist.
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Who killed Harlan?
In At loggerheads, in which a word was banned from the script, Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer), a wealthy and famous author of detective novels, is found dead the day after his 85th birthday. Accompanied by two police officers, the private detective Benoît Blanc (Daniel Craig) leads the investigation by questioning the members of his family. A tribute to the work of Agatha Christie therefore, with two inspirations in mind: “When I was little, the adaptations of Agatha Christie that I watched were those with Peter Ustinov as Hercule Poirot. SO Death on the Nile et Murder in the Sun, which were the two largest. These movies had star-studded casts, they were big entertainment with a sense of humor, but not parodies like Clue or A corpse for dessert. It was pure investigations and the reference we had in mind with At loggerheads”, explained the director of the much criticized Star Wars: The Last Jedi.
The choice of first names
As with his models, Rian Johnson has surrounded himself with a first-class cast to At loggerheads. The former James Bond, who put on the Benoît Blanc costume in December 2022, thus gives the reply to Ana de Armas, Chris Evans, Jamie Lee Curtis, Michael Shannon, Toni Collette, Don Johnson or even Katherine Langford. In addition to his love for Agatha Christie, the American director also had fun choosing the first names of his characters. In this Thrombey family, the protagonists are indeed named after rock stars of the 70s: “Richard and Linda are a couple in the movie, and it comes from Richard and Linda Thompson. Joni, the character that Toni Collette plays, is obviously Joni Mitchell. And her deceased husband is Neil, which refers to Neil Young. Then Walt and Donna are Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, from Steely Dan.“, he revealed during an interview with Screen Crush. Ransom, camped by Chris Evans, on the other hand takes its origin from The Cosmic Trilogy written by CS Lewis (The world of Narnia). A fun and carefully thought out hidden meaning.
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