Rian Johnson

Brick puts hard-boiled detective dialogue into the mouths of Californian sixteen-year-olds and shoots a high school like a 1940s underworld, without ever winking at it. Taking a genre completely seriously in the wrong setting is the recurring move. Looper runs a hitman against his older self and spends its back half on a farm; Knives Out gives away the solution at the halfway mark and gets more tense afterwards. The pleasure is watching a familiar machine reassembled with a part in an unexpected place.

Signature

• Genre transplanted intact into a setting that should reject it.
• Structural reveals placed early, so tension survives the answer.
• Dense, mannered dialogue delivered at speed.
• Class resentment worked into the puzzle.