Netflix’s Knives Out 2 will be titled Glass Onion, an excellent continuation of the original murder mystery’s best line by Detective Blanc. Following Knives Out’s success in 2019, Netflix snatched up the rights to produce two sequels, which bring back Daniel Craig’s Detective Benoit Blanc for more mysteries. The eccentric detective will solve a murder case on a boat in Greece for Knives Out 2, introducing a more claustrophobic setting for the unfolding mystery than Knives Out‘s original mansion setting.
Knives Out was particularly praised for its satire of murder mysteries and subversion of the genre’s tropes, with the lead detective styled as a southern homage to Agatha Christie’s Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. This iconic mystery character was notable for his unorthodox approach to his cases, especially in his description of the “little grey cells” that describe his critical thinking. When Benoit Blanc tackled the murder of Harlan Thrombey in Knives Out, he used a similarly curious way to critically comprehend the clues at hand, as exemplified by his best “donut hole” line.
The most memorable line from Rian Johnson’s Knives Out is Benoit Blanc’s description of how to approach the Thrombey case in terms of the “donut hole in the donut’s hole… that the donut’s hole has a hole in its center – it is not a donut hole at all but a smaller donut with its own hole, and our donut is not a hole at all.” The line was meant to be an incredibly confusing analogy for Benoit Blanc’s eccentric strategies for solving the central whodunit mystery, which, of course, he did at the end of Knives Out. Netflix’s sequel is repeating this quirk of Detective Blanc with Knives Out 2‘s Glass Onion title, another food analogy that symbolizes a confusing way to approach the peculiarities of the case at hand. Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery‘s title suggests that Benoit Blanc will give another speech about an even more confusing analogy to help the characters to understand his tactics in Knives Out 2, making the “donut hole” line part of a fun recurring quirk for the detective rather than a one-off confusing bit.
While the “donut hole” line still makes very little sense apart from the fact that there are plenty of unexplained holes in the stories given by the Thrombey family, the “glass onion” comparison for Knives Out 2 is much easier to grasp. The meaning of Knives Out 2’s Glass Onion label explains that the mystery may appear evident on the outside but has more intriguing layers as you peel to the center. There’s always a sense of misdirection even with appearing transparency, so Daniel Craig’s detective will be peeling back these layers of the clear onion as he solves his next case.
“Glass Onion” also happens to be the title of a song by The Beatles from 1968, which was written in response to the obsession of the band’s fans in trying to find hidden meanings in all of their work. Both the title and the song were intentionally deceptive; fans were trying to find layers to a song that was confusing yet transparent in its lack of meaning. Just as Benoit Blanc realized that the Thrombey case was a donut’s hole within a donut’s hole or just a donut itself when addressing the inconsistencies in the murder mystery, the whodunit realization in Netflix’s 2022 movie Knives Out 2 will be similarly paradoxical as the detective uncovers the crime’s truth.
