All the Old Knives

Before we get excited, All the Old Knives is not a sequel to Knives Out. Although, you have to wonder if whoever is working on the sequel saw this title and kicked a chair leg. All the Old Knives has nothing to do with a murder mystery. Unless you count secrets, espionage, and interrogations… On second thought, this so-called suspense sounds an awful lot like a murder mystery, just on a much larger scale. Who are CIA agents if not expert detectives? What is a spy film if not a time-sensitive mystery? All the Old Knives is a classic international spy drama, full of secrets and tangled webs, that gets by without – if you can believe it – drawing a single literal knife.

Unless you count dinner knives. All the Old Knives begins in Vienna, at the US embassy, minutes before a hijacked plane is lost with everyone onboard. Agent Celia Harrison (Thandiwe Newton) is so overwhelmed by her team’s failure that she quits on the spot. Although briefly pursued down the block by her colleague and lover, Henry Pelham (Chris Pine), Henry is no match for a distraught Celia in high-healed boots and she disappears from his life. Eight years go by and the US government, smelling something fishy in the details, decides to reopen the hijacking case. They recruit Henry to track down a few old colleagues and suss out whether the terrorist group responsible could have had a mole on the inside. One of the government’s top suspects is Celia, now a civilian, which gives Henry an excuse to fly to California and check in on his ex-girlfriend’s new life. They meet at a swanky restaurant, order multiple glasses of wine, and finally piece together the mystery of what happened to that tragic flight eight years ago, over one course after another.

Who doesn’t love a good mystery? Especially one based on a book. There’s something about a novel’s way of hiding details in the mundane until the necessary moment that translates so well to film. Olen Steinhauer wrote both the novel and the screenplay to All the Old Knives, so we can bet that the original material has translated neatly from page to screen. Intelligence films aren’t the most regular genre in cinema, so when one comes along it feels like a treat. Like the new season of a good show. True, All the Old Knives looks very similar to every other modern CIA suspense on the shelf, with workaholic heroes, ticking timelines, middle eastern villains, and precious secrets that always slip out; but the story’s way of framing the action between two people sharing memories over lunch/dinner somehow calms the generic haste usually found in this genre. The pulse-pumping minutes happened eight years ago; what concerns us now isn’t what’s next, but the importance of what we missed. How does it all piece together? Who’s keeping a key secret? Did someone make a decision or did someone make a mistake?

If you think that All the Old Knives sounds confusing, you’re absolutely right. Thirty seconds in and I was already lost. No one will stop and explain what’s going on; you just have to absorb what you can and hope that it’s relevant later on. Thankfully, feeling lost is part of the experience and it doesn’t take too long to get up to speed.

Obviously, the writing tells us what we need to know when we need to know it, but we can’t discount Thandiwe Newton and Chris Pine for connecting us to their characters even when the story gets a little hazy. All the Old Knives begins with Celia and Henry in a committed relationship. Like two YA novel characters full of shameless PDA. Jump to the present and our ex-lovers are reconnecting years after Celia’s disappearance. Reserved and polite they may be, but that tenderness still peeks through, even while Henry grills Celia with questions and Celia tries not to gush about her kids. It’s the kind of acting where something, both in the past and present, is always hiding under the surface. You just need to wait the story out to understand what that thing could be – secrets, regret, or our imagination.

All the Old Knives doesn’t add anything new to the genre. The biggest change is that the countdown to the imminent disaster has already happened and the plane full of civilians is long gone. At least, so we thought. There’s a second disaster – the identity of a guilty party – that’s still under wraps. All the Old Knives spends most of its time getting us to care about the consequences, as deeply as the Vienna agents would have, so that when the mystery is solved eight years later, we can empathize with that complicated mix of relief and closure. If you love spy dramas then All the Old Knives will surely delight. Although not quite fresh enough to be memorable, it’s still an enjoyable 7/10.

Oh Celia, you’re breaking my heart.