This month just started, but it already feels like it’s flying by so quickly! We’ve had to pleasure of reading and reviewing so many wonderful fantasies and contemporary novels. And our list of October audiobooks has just as much diversity.
Are you in the mood for a queer sports romance? What about a quirky whodunit mystery? We’ve got it all in our newest Sweet Listens!
Content warning: The Honey POP encourages mindful listening and checking the author’s website for any additional content warnings.
For No Mortal Creature By Keshe Chow
Image Source: Penguin Random House
Kicking off our October audiobook recommendations is Kesha Chow’s dark romantasy, For No Mortal Creature! Inspired by the classic Gothic novel Wuthering Heights, this haunting and magical story follows Jia Yi, a girl with the power of resurrection. She can move between the realm of the living and the dead, an ability she must now use to retrieve a long-lost sword and save her grandma. The only ones who can help her are Lin, the boy she had loved before he betrayed her, and Prince Essien, her mortal enemy. Let’s just say we weren’t expecting the love triangle to steal our hearts as quickly as it did…
Next in our Sweet Listens roundup is A. M. Woody’s swoony YA romance, Most Valuable Player! To his great dismay, Cameron “Cam” Morelli, the school’s cocky star quarterback, gets rejected by the team’s sarcastic water boy, Mason Gray. As fate would have it, Mason is the only person who can help tutor him and get his grades up to go back on the field. The two of them grow closer, each one letting down his defenses and becoming each other’s safe spaces. Cam is so much more than what his jock persona presents. Mason must face an abusive ex and accept the reality that what happened to him was never his fault.
The Dysfunctional Family’s Guide To Murder By Kate Emery
Image Source: Penguin Random House
Our final October audiobook is a quirky murder mystery with family drama around every corner. A family vacation turns into a crime scene when the family’s matriarch GG dies in The Dysfunctional Family’s Guide to Murder by Kate Emery. Fourteen-year-old Ruth has read enough mystery novels to get started on the case. And with the help of her newfound cousin Dylan, she starts to discover family secrets from everyone in the house that could’ve led to GG’s death. The plot twists and new clues were jaw-dropping, and we gripped the edge of our seats during the big reveal at the end! (We had a feeling but weren’t 100% sure.)
What do you think of this month’s audiobook recommendations? Which of these October audiobooks are you most interested in listening to? Let us know on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram!
About 75 miles from Hollywood, an animated high school science teacher held his phone screen up to his students. He had taught Celeste Rivas Hernandez years ago, he told the class, displaying a photo of himself alongside her. Rivas Hernandez, a 15-year-old girl who was found dead this month in the trunk of an impounded Tesla, had, he added, “been missing since I taught her.”
The remarks, as displayed in footage obtained by TMZ, were among the latest installments in the trail of breadcrumbs left behind about Rivas Hernandez and D4vd, the 20-year-old Los Angeles singer to whom the Tesla is registered, and a testament to the morbid interest that has accompanied it. After receiving a report of a rotting odor coming from a car in an impound lot near the Hollywood Hills home where D4vd had been staying, authorities identified Rivas Hernandez’s dismembered corpse. On Monday, days after police raided the property, the homeowner told the Daily Mail that D4vd’s manager broke his $20,000-per-month lease.
A suspect has not been named in the investigation into Rivas Hernandez’s death, and D4vd has not been accused of any wrongdoing. The intrigue surrounding the case has largely centered on the correspondences between Rivas Hernandez and D4vd’s lives. An unreleased Dv4d track appeared online that included lyrics describing how the scent of a girl named Celeste, “with my name tattooed on her chest,” was sticking to the singer’s clothes. The teen had a tattoo reading “Shhh…” on her right index finger, TMZ reported, and D4vd has one in the same location. Footage surfaced of the two of them livestreaming together in the months before she went missing in 2024. (A spokesperson for D4vd said in a statement to NBC News that the singer “has been informed about what’s happened,” and “is fully cooperating with the authorities.”)
The singer’s blunt self-presentation and motifs, now often taken literally, have stoked public interest in the case. D4vd has brought a casket on stage at performances, made a music video in which one blood-soaked version of his body carries another into a trunk, and, among his many macabre lyrics delivered in a flat affect, sang in his 2022 breakout single “Romantic Homicide,” “I killed you and I didn’t even regret it.”
D4vd began making music in Houston as a homeschooled teenager. From the start, his output was tied to the social media waters in which he was swimming: He has said he grew up listening only to gospel, and that his mother suggested songwriting as an alternative when YouTube started cracking down on his montages of copyrighted video games. Landing on a wobbly mixture of bedroom pop, indie rock, and R&B, he made his debut on the Billboard Hot 100 after snippets of “Romantic Homicide” found traction on TikTok and soon signed to Interscope Records. By 2025, he was opening for SZA and sharing the front row at an Amiri runway show in Paris with J Balvin and Lucky Blue Smith.
Whenever we crave a murder mystery, we always seem to think of Maureen Johnson. The thrill of gathering clues and figuring out the investigation hits different with all her books. This month, she teamed up with illustrator Jay Cooper to give us a solve-it-yourself mystery—You Are The Detective: The Creeping Hand Murder!
This new murder mystery by Maureen Johnson and Jay Cooper comes out just in time for you to plan your Halloween parties and themed dinners this fall. We had so much fun reading along to You Are The Detective: The Creeping Hand Murder, and here’s why!
Image Source: Penguin Random House
Book Overview: You Are The Detective: The Creeping Hand Murder
Content warnings: death, blood, bodies, references to drug use, addiction, and overdose, heavy drinking, drowning, stabbing, poisoning (Read at your discretion!)
Summary:Dear Detective,
Surely you have seen the papers and read about the dreadful murder of the American novelist—stabbed while in a room with six other people, and yet no one went near him or saw the murder occur. The crime is so devious, so logistically impossible, that it seems to have been committed not by a person but by a disembodied hand.
I must confess that we are at a loss. Who wrote the poison pen letters that lured these seven people to this deadly gathering? A poet, an earl, an actress, a cook, a telephone operator, and a lothario . . . What do they have in common? And how could a man be stabbed in a room full of suspects, even though no one went near him or saw a thing?
We have had our best people on the case, Detective, and we still can’t make heads or tails of it. We are giving this case file to you. Can you decipher the clues, decode the witness statements, and identify the murderer? You are our last hope. Can you help us crack the Creeping Hand Murder?
Yours truly, Detective Chief Inspector of the Metropolitan Police
Interacting With The Mystery
If you’re anything like us, an interactive murder mystery makes for a great way to pass the time. You Are The Detective: The Creeping Hand Murder by Maureen Johnson and Jay Cooper tested our memory and attention to detail. The photos of the crime scene combined with each suspect’s testimony made us feel like we were there when it happened. We kept flipping back and forth through the pages to try and catch any clues we missed the first time around.
The Detailed Illustrations
The illustrations in You Are The Detective: The Creeping Hand Murder really sealed the deal for us. We especially love the floor plans and the photos of everyone at the crime scene. Every part of the illustrations is intentional, especially when certain photos come up later in the investigation. (No spoilers here!) We’re not ashamed to admit that more than a few details went over our heads. But trust that the incriminating evidence was there the whole time.
Final Guesses
Before we got to the big reveal in You Are The Detective: The Creeping Hand Murder, the authors gave us a pause to lock in our final predictions. Although we thought our two guesses had great odds of being the killer, we were ultimately wrong. Even when we try not to fall for the most obvious suspects, we couldn’t pick up on the real killer. We aren’t too worried, though. That just means we need to hone our detective skills a little more. And we’d be happy to do that with another solve-it-yourself mystery book! *wink wink*
Maureen Johnson and Jay Cooper’s interactive mystery, You are the Detective: The Creeping Hand Murder, was so entertaining and rich in detail. We were stumped until the end!
You are the Detective: The Creeping Hand Murder by Maureen Johnson and Jay Cooper comes out September 16th, and you can order a copy of it here!
How did you enjoy Maureen Johnson and Jay Cooper’s solve-it-yourself mystery? Were you able to find the murderer in You are the Detective: The Creeping Hand Murder? Let us know on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram!
Finally, the perpetually discounted, pushed-aside Leila gets a win. Well, it’s less of a celebratory, good stuff is coming my way sort of win and more of a “finally someone believes that an evil, powerful shadow figure is trying to kill me” one, which I guess, if you look at it hard enough isn’t much of a win at all. We may not be donning party hats or anything, but it is nice to see someone finally listen to Leila because, as it turns out, she knows more about what’s going on than anyone else on this boat. Most importantly, she informs Rufus that they may have arrested Winnie and she may have been the one to actually murder Danny, but she isn’t Viktor Sams — she is just one of his confederates, a minion tasked with a job. Viktor Sams is still at large.
Down in the bowels of the ship where Rufus found Leila hiding, she tells him her story. Six months ago, Leila was meeting with a source — see, I knew the whole clickbait thing was a cover to protect herself! — on a piece she was putting together. This poor man! Peter looks as frantic and desperate and terrified as Leila does now. When she asks him directly about Viktor Sams, he tells her that they shouldn’t even be saying his name; he has eyes and ears everywhere. He explains that he used to work for the NSA, tracing unusual payments on the dark web, and Viktor Sams’s name came up repeatedly. Once he started looking into him though, his life fell apart. Viktor Sams and his minions, whoever or however many there are, filled his hard drive with porn and he lost his job, his wife, and his kids just like that. He’s tried to track Viktor down, but the guy (or woman, I’m really leaning woman at the moment) is untraceable. He found evidence of him in Argentina, in Morocco, in Hong Kong — but just as quickly as he found him, all traces of him would disappear. “It’s like he’s everywhere and nowhere,” Peter tells Leila before warning her that even just saying his name aloud will get you on his list.
Peter’s warning turns out to be very, very true. As Leila is driving home from the meeting and listening to her recording of the conversation and recording her own notes — in which she says the name Viktor Sams — strange things start happening to the car. The GPS goes haywire. The radio has a mind of its own. The car speeds up and Leila can’t stop it — and that’s when she goes over the side of the road, almost killing her. So, yeah, no wonder Leila is having problems.
We learn the truth about that little walk Leila took the night of the murder and her interactions with Danny, too. The two meet up after Leila accuses him of following her, and he comes clean: He can’t believe she figured out Keith Trubitsky was just a cover. When he asks about Viktor Sams, she explains that (1) she got involved with the Collier family during her investigations, discovering them to be possible victims of Viktor Sams, and (2) DO NOT SAY VIKTOR SAMS. While the jury is still out on No. 1, Leila is definitely right about No. 2. Danny is out there saying his name one minute, and the next, he has a harpoon through his chest.
Leila is proven right on some other fronts, too. This woman is productive today! Not only does she finally ask Anna, who refuses to believe her own wife about anything she says, for a divorce (just wait until Leila finds out about Eleanor!), but Leila also goes about searching for surveillance in her room once again. Jackpot: She finds a camera installed within the wood molding in one corner of the bedroom. When Rufus and Teddy take a look, they realize it could’ve only been installed by someone who had an understanding of the ship and was able to get on and install it before passengers arrived. They assume it had to be done by a crew member — which means Viktor Sams has at least two people on the Varuna working for him.
And so they’re off to narrow down the suspect list. What a cute little detective trio these three make! I know this story is supposed to be about Rufus mentoring Imogene, but she’s off having wine and chatting about Caravaggio with Sunil after getting the Ukrainian refugees safely on their way to Malta — and she has some real competition for the new assistant detective position. While down in the security office, Rufus notices a few peculiar things and does his Cotesworth magic. Isn’t it curious that the exact places Leila said Peter mentioned as locations Viktor Sams would pop up — Argentina, Morocco, Hong Kong — are locations the Varuna has sailed? And if one wanted to be everywhere and nowhere, wouldn’t running your HQ from a location that frequently moves on its own kind of be a genius place to do it? Rufus thinks so. He, Teddy, and Leila head downstairs to a location on the ship schematics that Rufus thinks might just work for something like this, and, oddly, the hallway where they are begins to get narrower as if the room was made for something behind the walls. When Rufus smashes through one section of the wall, he realizes his hunch is right: They just stumbled upon Viktor Sams’s entire operation. Man, Rufus gets a lot done when Imogene is on-shore!
So what is Imogene up to on land in Malta? Honestly, not a ton. After helping Eva and her parents, Imogene has a mini-meltdown about how difficult the past few days have been and Sunil wants to help. He thinks he knows someone in town (he knows everyone in town, apparently) who could help them figure out the date on that bill of lading hidden in the Collier-Mills books — a forensic accountant who specializes in international trade documentation. Why Imogene doesn’t at least question how in the world Sunil happens to be friends with the one type of person who could help them in this endeavor and just happens to be in Malta where they currently are is beyond me. Isn’t she supposed to be at least a little good at detective work? Is she just playing Sunil?
One other super suspicious moment with Sunil: As he and Imogene flirt their way through Malta, they wind up taking in Caravaggio’s The Beheading of St. John the Baptist, which they are both quite knowledgeable about. Imogene definitely clocks the way Sunil compares himself to the artist, a man who tried to absolve himself from a murder by creating something beautiful — a man who seemed “out of time.” We don’t know a ton about Sunil, but we do know that he so badly wanted to restore the Varuna to make something real and beautiful, and he’s obsessed with restoring it to exactly how it looked when it first set sail 70 years ago (he, too, is a man out of time). Did Sunil … kill someone? I’m stressed!
Later, the big “secret” he reveals to Imogene when she asks him to be real with her is that he’s broke because of the Varuna project. Sunil has a trustworthy face, but I’m sorry, something shady is happening here.
After Imogene agrees to leave the bill of lading with Sunil’s friend to work on — she only agrees to it because she trusts Sunil, which, um, is this a mistake? — the two realize a man has followed them in a white suit. They make a run for it. They … are having fun? They are definitely getting horned up, which is basically business as normal for all the passengers on this ship. On the way back to the Varuna, Imogene decides she wants to share her deepest, darkest secret, too: She cried more the day Rufus abandoned her than the day her mother died. She got really attached to that guy! I wish you could feel more of that tension, that anger, that longing for a parental figure in Imogene and Rufus’s scenes together, but thus far, there’s very little crackling between them. Okay, the anger is there, but the deeper emotional connection? Not so much. Hey, at least Imogene is connecting with Sunil, and by connecting, I obviously mean putting her mouth on his mouth because they definitely do that before reboarding the Varuna. Good for them! Maybe!
• So, who do we like for Viktor Sams? Since he was up to no good 18 years ago, that eliminates our younger would-be suspects unless “Viktor Sams” isn’t just one person but a movement or something. What about Hilde, you guys? Is the real Interpol going to show up at some point and make us all feel like fools?
• I haven’t found the big Collier/Chun deal super compelling thus far, but the big meeting they have in this episode is wild! The new deal the Chuns are proposing is, yes, three billion dollars, but also they want to own 51 percent of the company — they want a majority stake. All of the Colliers are immediately on their feet, ready to walk — except for Lawrence, who says he came here to close a deal and … does just that! He gives the Chuns 51 percent of his company! His family is aghast!
• Lawrence was acting strange before the deal meeting, too. He’s still locked away in his cabin, sucking down those blue smoothies. When Tripp comes to ask him for a million dollars (big ol’ eye roll) from his trust, he bites his head off. When Tripp follows that up by asking if he is blackmailing the Governor of Washington, well, he really loses it. This guy gives me the creeps!
• Alexandra confronts Llewellyn about the photos of her and Tripp and all that coke. He admits the Colliers had Tripp tailed for a while, but he has no idea who sent those photos to her — it wasn’t part of some Collier blackmail situation. She reminds Llewellyn that she, too, has blackmail she can play with — she even brought it on this very trip! People are very prepared here. Alexandra does not, however, look prepared for whatever illness she’s currently dealing with. However, can she feel that bad when she needs almost zero convincing to hook up with Tripp again?
• Yeah, yeah, I’ve been saying everyone is horny on this boat, and yet I still was unprepared for Interpol’s finest Hilde Eriksen being turned on by Llewellyn’s dom/sub kink. She’s waiting for him outside of his room to punish him. Get yours, girl!
You can expect to associate the name Adam Sandler with Netflix for at least a little while longer. Since 2014, the actor has made nine movies and one comedy special for the streaming service. He was originally hired to make four movies in 2014, and the streamer renewed the deal in 2017 and again in 2020, per Business Insider. Since his latest deal, Sandler has released three films — “Hustle,” “Murder Mystery 2,” and “You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah,” and at least one more is on the way. Over the years, the deal has also given us gems like “Murder Mystery” and “The Week Of” as well as a couple of misses — who can forget “The Ridiculous 6”?
Sandler has long been a beloved force in comedy thanks to memorable roles in the likes of “Happy Gilmore” and “Billy Madison.” In recent years, he’s shown off his dramatic side, with his starring role in “Uncut Gems” garnering extensive acclaim. Still, comedy has always been Sandler’s bread and butter, and with “You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah,” which premiered on Aug. 25, he returns to his roots with the dad jokes and hilarious mishaps he’s best known for. His comedic work has even earned him the Mark Twain Prize For American Humor, which he received in a ceremony on March 19.
Many of his Netflix projects have been critically panned, but Sandler doesn’t seem to be bothered by that. “When someone asks me: those bad reviews you get — how does that make you feel?” he said at the ceremony, per The Hollywood Reporter. “The reason they don’t hurt me is because [my friends and I are having so much fun making these movies]. Everything we do together makes me feel like the critics don’t know what they’re talking about.”
In honor of “You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah” and the comedic force that is Sandler, check out all of the movies Sandler has made as part of his partnership with Netflix so far.
It’s the usual “rule” that a sequel is required to be spectacularly inferior to its original. But Murder Mystery 2 seemed to take that unspoken edict way too much into consideration during the “writing” of the script. Then again, was it really “written”? For there are far too many moments throughout the “narrative” when one tends to wonder if the script was “generated” by ChatGPT…but that might actually be insulting to ChatGPT. However, no, the film is attributed to Vanderbilt family progeny James Vanderbilt, who once again recently made a name for himself separate from New York wealth by co-writing the scripts for Scream (2022) and Scream VI. Both being far cries from the timbre of Murder Mystery (which he also wrote), and even further still from Murder Mystery 2, which manages to prove that most sequels exist solely to rest on the laurels of their original films.
As such, there is little need to “try.” Everyone here is clearly involved for the paycheck. Hence, a total lack of cohesion and plausibility to anything about this narrative, which begins in Nick (Adam Sandler) and Audrey Spitz’s (Jennifer Anistone) apartment after an overly heavy-handed recap about what happened in the first installment, in addition to telling us what the duo is up to now: sinking all of their savings into a fledgling detective business still coasting off the reputation of their one big case from 2019. Resultantly, they get stuck with less “glamorous” jobs that require using Audrey as bait to lure potentially philandering husbands into being photographed with her. This, of course, glossing over the fact that cheating is no longer the scandal that it once was (even to vanilla straights) and that someone like Audrey isn’t exactly the average man’s “first choice” for an affair. A fact made clear by the husband in question, “Silverfox” (Tony Goldwyn), walking into his living room to find the Spitzes telling “Mrs. Silverfox” (Annie Mumolo) that he has been “stepping out,” only for Silverfox to rebuff this claim by announcing that he’s been going out alone to plan a surprise anniversary party and that Audrey was the one hitting on him. The former excuse makes no sense whatsoever (why go to a bar by yourself to plan a surprise party?), but it’s just the tip of the iceberg apropos of nonsensical goings-on, with the assumption perhaps being that “movies like these” aren’t about making sense, they’re about “having fun.” But a movie is a movie regardless of genre, and should still adhere to certain, let us say, “tenets.”
Murder Mystery 2 feels little obligation to do any such thing, starting with Vikram “The Maharajah” Govindan (Adeel Akhtar) calling up Nick while riding a jet ski (because rich people are just so craaaaazzzzzyyy like that) to invite him to his wedding. This invitation, naturally, is timed to coincide with their squabbles about work, including Nick’s argument with Audrey regarding their marketing approach (Nick nominates the “disruptive marketing” style of having floss business cards [“First Floss, Then Spitz”], while Audrey thinks it’s ridiculous). What it all boils down to for Nick is: “Do you know any couples who also work together that actually get along?” Audrey replies (with one of the few comedy gold lines of the movie), “Billie Eilish and Finneas.” A riff on the duo’s incestuous dynamic, Nick has to remind, “They’re brother and sister.” Luckily for both, the argument is interrupted by this call. The one that ultimately leads to being a showcase for Hawaii, as Vik’s “private island” is actually Lanikuhonua Lagoon in Oahu (something Mike White should have thought about for season one of The White Lotus). Either way, it’s where his wedding to Claudette (Mélanie Laurent, who is acting in a role and movie that’s way beneath her) takes place.
This location, however, becomes overwrought, especially since the movie’s marketing is contingent upon the alleged bulk of it occurring in Paris (thus the maddening tagline: “Deux or Die”). But no, it takes us almost thirty-six minutes to leave the island, well above the standard “end of act one” practice. And, being that Murder Mystery 2 clocks in at approximately one hour and thirty minutes (which still feels too long), it was theoretically all set up to follow a very conventional three-act structure that manages to get biffed in manifold ways by the end. Manifest in a never-ending denouement that keeps piling on non sequitur “conclusions” for the sake of it. Seemingly under the pretense of being “comical.” But just because one piles on a slew of random occurrences doesn’t make the outcome automatically funny, so much as a poor writing choice. Or, to quote Connor Miller (Mark Strong, also out of place in this movie), “There really is no end to your bad decision-making, is there?”
Incidentally, Jennifer Aniston recently remarked of her golden ticket to being an icon, Friends, “There’s a whole generation of people, kids, who are now going back to episodes of Friends and find them offensive.” To be real, there were many people who didn’t find Friends funny when it was actually on the air either, but anyway… The point is that perhaps with this mentality in mind, Aniston is glomming onto projects that are the “lowest common denominator” of comedy for a reason. And yes, like Sandler, she’s long been known to do that (see: Horrible Bosses, Wanderlust, We’re the Millers, Mother’s Day, et al.), but, speaking to her own comment, it’s as though these lowest common denominator comedies have gotten even lower as a result of what she mentioned about the risk of offending people. Nonetheless, there was plenty of room left to ream the French as the “unexpected” villain of the story remarked of his plan to blow up the Eiffel Tower: “There’s only one thing I hate more than witnesses, and that’s the French.”
The French, to be sure, are among the few “sects,” for Americans in particular, that remain “fair game” for evisceration on the “comedy” front. This also extends to fellow Europeans the Italians, who are generally mocked at every turn for their supposed manner and supposed accent (which Americans still portray as having a superfluous “a” inserted in between every word, as in: “It’s-a me, Mario”). With this in mind, Aniston lamented that it’s “really hard for comedians, because the beauty of comedy is that we make fun of ourselves, make fun of life.” But no, most of the making fun of in the U.S. that went on in the past was never self-directed. It was never about the sham of American life or the uncouthness of Americans, so much as a bid to help solidify the othering of those who were marginalized already (on Friends, that was done amply to the LGBTQIA+ community). This is the real reason white comedians are “on edge” about comedy “changing”—i.e., becoming less bigoted. This despite Aniston saying that presenting bigotry in comedy is ultimately a way to “joke about a bigot and have a laugh.” In one sense, yes. In another, such thinking underestimates how fucking literal people are, and that they might use such “comedy” to justify their own legitimate bigotry. So now we’re saddled with “straightforward” (read: stupid) comedy such as Murder Mystery 2, which somehow manages to be so bad that it insults its predecessor.
But lack of laughs or decent Parisian representation (that’s kind of Netflix’s thing now, what with Emily in Paris as one of its “tent-pole” shows) won’t stop this gravy train from being a success as Aniston insists, “Everybody needs funny! The world needs humor! [though that’s not what Murder Mystery 2 is]. We can’t take ourselves too seriously. Especially in the United States. Everyone is far too divided.” Alas, the division in this scenario will stem from those with a brain trying to watch a laughless (and sexless, for that matter) “romp” wherein “style” outweighs all trace of substance and those whose brains have been murdered already as this movie seeks to be an amalgam of everything from Legally Blonde (with the perm “revelation” being likenable to the henna one in Murder Mystery 2) to Shotgun Wedding to Glass Onion. Doing its best, as it were, to tick everyone’s box, thereby ticking no one’s.
It’s a Knives Out mystery. This Wednesday—when Glass Onion will have made something like $15 million on less than 700 screens—Netflix will pull it from theaters. Some analysts believe the streamer has committed Hollywood’s ultimate sin: leaving money on the table. But streamers, after all, are in the business of streaming.
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery is the first Netflix movie to play at all three of the country’s biggest theater chains: AMC, Regal, and Cinemark. It will be available on Netflix itself on Dec. 23. The streamer isn’t reporting box office numbers, but according to a person familiar with the movie’s theatrical release, it earned more than $13 million during the five-day Thanksgiving weekend. That’s a strong showing that would put it behind only Disney’s sequel Black Panther: WakandaForever and its animated movie Strange World. But what might have been valedictory headlines have been tempered by the fact that the movie will now go into hibernation for nearly a month.
The simple truth is that for Netflix the streaming viewership for Glass Onion could ultimately have more long-term value than box office returns. The company, which had been searching for a franchisable movie property, paid $450 million in 2021 to acquire the rights to two Knives Out sequels, according to Variety. The first film, a sly, spiky murder mystery starring Daniel Craig, Ana de Armas, Chris Evans and Jamie Lee Curtis, was a holiday season hit, grossing nearly $313 million worldwide as families came out to the theaters. Writer-director Rian Johnson made the deal with Netflix in the middle of the pandemic when the future of moviegoing was uncertain.
This year, key execs at the streamer reportedly pushed Ted Sarandos for a broad theatrical presence for the company’s movies because, even leaving box office aside, it’s still the noisiest way to launch a movie. (Netflix has given limited theatrical releases to films in the past, particularly awards contenders that have to meet requirements for Oscar eligibility.) Sarandos held firm on prioritizing subscribers rather than ticket buyers, but agreed to put Glass Onion in theaters for one week in what Netflix described as a “special sneak preview event” to build buzz.
Glass Onion finds Craig’s eccentric detective, Benoit Blanc, unraveling a murder on a narcissistic tech billionaire’s comically over-the-top home on a Greek island. The movie, which also stars Janelle Monáe, Kate Hudson, Edward Norton, and others, has a 93% from critics on Rotten Tomatoes and, according to GoldDerby.com, it’s the streaming industry’s best shot at a best picture Oscar nomination. The demand for tickets this past weekend was strong. The movie averaged $19,000 per screen, the source said. On Friday, AMC CEO Adam Aron tweeted that it was the top movie at the chain. Now, anyone frustrated that the movie is disappearing from theaters, will have to subscribe to Netflix if they don’t already—which was the whole point in the first place. Once they’ve watched Glass Onion, maybe The Crown or Lindsay Lohan will convince them to stick around.
Tang Wei and Park Hae-il star in ‘Decision To Leave.’
Mubi
As a detective, Hae-joon is very focused on his work. He finds it hard to let unsolved cases go. A central character in Park Chan-wook’s film, Decision to Leave, Hae-joon investigates so fastidiously that his determination intrudes on other aspects of his life. He can’t sleep, which means he’s always running on empty, but he’s running nevertheless, sometimes for days on end. The detective, played by Park Hae-il, pays minimal attention to his marriage, but keeps a wall full of grisly crime photos to spur on his investigations. It has been suggested to him that those crime scene photos are the reason he can’t sleep.
When he meets Seo-rae, played by award-winning Chinese actress Tang Wei, he ignores the immediate attraction he feels because she’s a suspect in her husband’s death. Or at least he tries to ignore the way he feels. He stakes out her house, but the attention he pays to the details of her life might also be described as stalking. Hae-joon’s younger partner, played by Go Kyung-po, is convinced that Seo-rae played a part in her husband’s death, but Hae-joon is not so sure. He just needs to keep watching her for a little while longer.
When he’s watching her, it’s as if he’s in the room with her, which might be exactly where he wants to be. Oddly, when he’s near her, he can comfortably fall asleep. She’s aware that he’s watching when she consumes ice cream, talks to a cat or watches TV, and she also begins to watch him. Is she trying to understand him or deciding how to use his interest?
The storyline includes myriad twists and turns, with shifting perspectives that are pleasingly reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock’s film Vertigo. That’s no surprise since Park once said he decided to become a director after seeing Vertigo. Each twist further complicates the mystery of who Seo-rae is. Is she an innocent victim or a heartless killer and does it even matter?
Decision to Leave is the story of an obsession, the kind of crazy urge to be with someone that makes a person abandon reason. Park’s film career has explored various manifestations of obsession. His 2016 film The Handmaiden is an erotic tale of love, obsession and revenge. Park’s internationally renowned Vengeance Trilogy, which consists of Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002), Oldboy (2003) and Lady Vengeance (2005), might focus on revenge, yet the desire for revenge is also an obsession. As a filmmaker he is drawn to examine the subject, much the way the fastidious Hae-Joon is drawn to the unpredictable Seo-rae.
Moody and masterfully done, his film Decision To Leave teases mystery after mystery, leaving viewers to wonder where the thin line between love and romantic obsession really lies.
Decision To Leave was shown at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, where it won Park the award for Best Director, and has been selected as South Korea’s entry for best international feature film at the 2023 Academy Awards. Distributed by Mubi, the murder-mystery-romance will premiere in New York and LA theaters on Oct. 14.
Park Hae-il has appeared in dozens of Korean films including Hansan: Rising Dragon, The Last Princess and The King’s Letters. Tang Wei is a popular Chinese TV and film actress, the winner of a Cannes Film Festival Award, a Golden Horse Film Festival Award and a Baeksang Arts Award.
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