Knives Out

Knives Out (2019)

7 corrected entries

(19 votes)

Corrected entry: In three separate scenes in the movie Marta is said to be from Uruguay, Paraguay, and Brazil.

Correction: Pretty sure that's just to show the self-involved nature of the people saying it - they've never even bothered to learn where she's actually from.

Corrected entry: When Harlan and Marta are discussing how quickly he will succumb after she injects him, Harlan says "It's 8ish now" but we know that it has to be almost midnight, because Marta draws attention to the time as she leaves.

Phangoil

Correction: He means it's about 8 minutes until he dies (as in it had been 2 minutes since his injection), not it's about 8pm. He was explaining that he had 8 minutes left, and it would be a minimum of 15 minutes for an ambulance to arrive.

Corrected entry: The second scene shows Marta bringing Harlan his coffee first to his bedroom, and when he is not there she goes upstairs to his den only to find him on the sofa with his throat slashed. This does not make sense since she later tells Blanc the true story and how she saw Harlan slash his own throat. Therefore the second scene where she looks for him and then surprised to find his body makes no sense. Furthermore it is unlikely that any blood would have gotten on her shoe since she was a distance away in the doorway when Harlan slashed his throat. Unlikely that the blood would have splattered that far away.

Tele

Correction: I am very confused. What 'second scene'? Are we talking about the opening? The person bringing the coffee is not Marta, it's the housemaid, Fran. She does not know anything about what went on, so her reaction is genuine.

Sammo

Correction: Fran discovered the body, not Marta. Also, arterial blood can splatter a significant distance.

She was no where near his body when he cuts his throat.

Corrected entry: Ransom switches the medicine in the vials. His expectation is that Marta will look at the vials and inject accordingly. He does not know, nor can he expect, that Marta would know how they "feel" as opposed to reading the labels. If Marta had looked at the labels first, but "felt" they were wrong somehow, she probably wouldn't have given Harlan the medicine. It isn't until after she injects the medicine that she "sees" her mistake. There is no way for Ransom to have expected this outcome.

Correction: Ransom expected her to pick up the one labelled as the correct medication (but actually containing morphine). This would have caused an overdose for which Marta would be blamed, and therefore the updated will would become invalid. Instead, she did it by instinct, which led to the plot of the film, and Ransom needing to adapt his plan. He did not expect this outcome, so there is no plot hole.

Corrected entry: He switches the medication with one syringe, that is impossible. One container is emptied in the syringe and one container is full. Leaving him with one empty and one full container and a full syringe with nowhere to put it in.

Correction: It's likely that there is more than one syringe in Martha's bag.

Correction: The narration during the scene states that he used the "syringes" (plural) he found in the bag to switch the contents of the vials.

Corrected entry: Being an accomplished mystery writer and assuming that he had been injected with 100 mg of morphine, Harlan should have realised that his suicide would have been suspicious once they did the toxicology analysis.

Correction: Harlan was doing the best he could on extremely short notice.

LorgSkyegon

Correction: If he died of an overdose then they would definitely do a toxicology report. He hoped that with an obvious alternative (suicide) they would not do one. Even with a lethal dose of morphine in his system, Marta would potentially be accused of malpractice, but she would not be directly responsible for his death and would (again, hopefully) be able to keep the inheritance.

He might have realised that once the family found out that he left everything to Marta, they would insist on an autopsy. Once they found the overdose, she would have been suspected of foul play.

Perhaps, but if he did not kill himself, it would be a certainty. He was trying to get the best outcome from a terrible scenario. Either way, it's not a plot hole.

Corrected entry: When Ransom interviews Marta at the diner, he has no clue that she actually gave Harlan the correct dose, yet the final reveal suggests he knew she was innocent at this time. It's only at the very end that we learn that she gave Harlan the correct dose because she can tell the difference based on the viscosity of the two liquids and only then that Ransom would have known that she was innocent. At the time of the interview at the diner this incorrect conclusion takes the audience down a fork in the plot that is totally incorrect based on this fatal mistake.

texasag

Correction: Interesting, but I am not sure I can pinpoint which part of the final reveal suggests he knew she was innocent 'all this time'? The day after the murder, he expected to see her accused of the homicide and therefore invalidate the part when she'd inherit. Instead, he hears that it's been ruled as suicide, and hires Blanc to uncover 'the truth', because suicide would be terrible for him, she'd get all the money. So he thought Blanc would reveal that he was killed by Marta, not that she was innocent. And when he got the vials back (which he needed to do anyway), he was seen by Fran, making necessary for him to kill her and implicate Marta either way. If you mean that during their conversation he figured out that she was innocent, Marta -does- say in her story and it is repeated at the end, that she thought she mixed the two vials up when they fell. So when they speak, he takes that as a fact and realises that if she really did accidentally give him the 'wrong' vial, she gave him the right one.

Sammo

Correction: Actually Ransom does know that Marta gave Harlan the correct dose of the meds, at the time of the interview at the diner itself. Because Marta was forced to tell the truth to Ransom about how she mixed up the meds. Now, Ransom knows that he switched the contents of the vials. So when Marta says that she switched the vials themselves, Ransom figures out that because he switched the contents of the vials, the effect of his action of trying to poison his grandfather was nullified. The fact that Ransom knew about the innocence of Marta, is not dependent on her ability to tell the meds apart by their viscosity and tincture, but on the fact that Ransom figured out of the nullification of his act of mixing up the contents of vials.

Plot hole: The killer shows up at the scheduled appointment at 8 AM. They kill the idiot blackmailer with an overdose of morphine. Remember, that morphine that supposedly killed Thrombey in 10 minutes. Marta finds the blackmailer at 10 AM...alive, and does CPR on them, keeping them alive long enough for the ambulance to come and bring them to the hospital, even if in critical condition. So we went from "kills in 10 minutes, you can't even try to save him" to "after 2 hours, you are still hanging on"? (01:56:10)

Sammo

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Suggested correction: Marta injected an absurdly large dose. A smaller overdose would not kill in 10 minutes.

I read that objection before. From 10 minutes to 2 hours there's quite a leap that the movie does not explain or address at all, if it were part of the plot they should have said why this difference, on something so time sensitive (of which they got the factual details wrong anyway). Even visually when you look at the dose injected to Harlan and the dose in the syringe for the murder, they do not look different. He even stabs her with the syringe. Which makes sense since he has no reason to leave her there with a small. Controlled overdose in her veins risking that she would be saved as it -almost - happens - it's amazing he got away with it to begin with because she is so dumb to show up for no reason in a derelict place without talking to her accomplice that passed her the toxi report, or anyone.Without a throwaway line from an investigator or anything of the sort ("but you injected her the wrong way, so she was still alive two hours after"), we are just left with an inconsistency.

Sammo

Suggested correction: You've assumed a hell of a lot! Marta said Thrombey was given a dose of 100 mg (instead 3) of Morphine and would die in 10 minutes unless given the antidote. You just asserted that "Thrombey would die in 10 minutes" as if it was fait accompli, while Thrombey didn't die of morphine overdoes at all! (He cut his own throat.) For all we know, Marta's 10-minute assessment was a worst-case-scenario assessment. Fran's age and physique, as well as Marta's CPR, helped negate the effect until the ambulance arrives. If the medics administered the antidote, it could have prolonged Fran's life. Finally, 2 hours is the time after which the viewer is informed of Fran's death, not her actual death time. Most importantly, this happens in the medical world all the time: A person who is supposed to die after 3 days lives for 16 years. There are case-by-case explanations for each one, but they baffle the medical examiners at first.

FleetCommand

Two hours is not my assumption or when the viewer is informed of her death; the killer gives the appointment to the victim at 8 AM and to Marta at 10 AM, so as I said, after 2 hours with 0 medical care on her she is still hanging on and with barely a little tap she is ready to dispense important clues. I go by what the movie says also about the 10 minutes overdose time. Of course if you tell me that baffling freak occurrences can happen all the time in medicine and that very precise statements from the movie don't matter because the character can just have gotten it wrong by over 10x and the movie does not acknowledge it at all, well, that's a very respectable opinion; mine is that fiction (a whodunnit, not a slasher flick with a killer surviving multiple gunshots and the like) is not reality and it should respond to higher standards than "I guess she was still alive somehow."

Sammo

I re-watched the movie to verify that Fran was given an appointment at 8 AM. I discovered something new: The bottle that was injected to Fran contained only 5 mg of Morphine. That's 1/20th of what was "supposedly" given to Thrombey Sr. So, yeah, 10x is OK. In fact, 20x is OK.

FleetCommand

No, no; it contains 5 mg of morphine PER ml, it's the concentration, not the total. Go back to the scene when Marta "messes up", the vials are the exact same as the one that Ransom injects (obviously, since they come from Marta's bag after all). It's new for you but I covered that already in the Factual Error about it. It's something that piles upon a previous mistake. She did not give him 100 mg of morphine because it would have emptied the vial (which is more than half full) and because a full vial of ketorlac would have killed Trombe regardless, at that concentration! The movie gets both the props and the medical facts wrong (100 mg of morphine does not even kill most patients, Harlan would have not died in 10 minutes especially since he takes safely big doses of toradol and morphine), but nothing - in the script - says that Marta or Ransom got basic medical facts wrong.

Sammo

Okay! It seems mistake after mistake is piling up. Now, it appears Fran lived 4 hours, during 2 of which she was unattended. Plus, 100 mg of Morphine from a 5 mg/ml vial amounts to 20 ml of liquid. Well, now, everything you say makes sense... or at least most of the things. On the whole, I think it was a complicated situation.

FleetCommand

More mistakes in Knives Out

Benoit Blanc: I suspect foul play. I have eliminated no suspects.

More quotes from Knives Out
More trivia for Knives Out

Question: In the flashbacks of Ransom storming out, it's different each time. The first time his Grandma speaks, the second time she's silent, and the third time she's holding cake, when she wasn't the other times. The flashbacks we see don't contradict each other, they're not really portrayed as coming from unreliable narrators, they're generally an honest portrayal of what happens, even when what they're telling the police isn't what we see happen. So why these minor, certainly deliberate, differences? Far as I'm aware it's the only time it happens too, not like there are lots of moments like this.

Jon Sandys

Chosen answer: She is holding cake all 3 times, actually, so the only difference is that the first time she speaks. It can be a case of unreliable narrator, but I'd write it down as a mistake (deliberate, probably, as the phrase is important for the plot and they didn't want to hammer it in), since as you said, the other times even when they tell things to the police in a different way from what happened, the details tend to stay consistent, except for parts that are obviously made up, such as who is putting down the birthday cake for Harlan Thrombey therefore appearing subservient and not as close (when Richard tells the story, it's Walt and his wife, when Walt tells the story it is Richard and his wife).

Sammo

Answer: Each time, it is being described by a different person. Maybe not all heard her speak.

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