Knives Out is gloriously constructed, a murder-mystery that never takes itself too seriously, and yet provides a wonderfully circuitous route from start to the final denouement.

Viewers know -- or think they know -- a lot of key points of the plot along the way of Rian Johnson's exquisite homage to Agatha Christie (and, perhaps at some level, the madcap movie Clue). Some plot lines are real, and some are red herrings, and anyone who thinks they know from the start -- or even the midpoint, or two-thirds of the way through -- how things will end, will most likely be proven wrong.

Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer) is a wealthy mystery writer who gathers his family together to celebrate his 85th birthday. The next morning, Harlan is found dead in his attic studio, apparently by his own hand.

The two police officers who investigate the scene, Lt. Elliott (LaKeith Stanfield) and Trooper Wagner (Noah Segan), conclude it was a suicide, but then a private investigator, Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), appears on the scene and believes that a murder has taken place and been cleverly concealed. Bewilderingly, Blanc has no idea who has hired him to look into the case.

But as the story unravels, it turns out that almost everyone at Harlan's birthday bash had motive for murder, and the happy family is anything but. Suspects include Thrombey's daughter Linda (Jamie Lee Curtis), her philandering husband Richard (Don Johnson) and their ne'er-do-well son Ransom (Chris Evans); Thrombey's son Walt (Michael Shannon), Walt's wife Donna (Riki Lindhome) and their son Jacob (Jaeden Martell); Thrombey's daughter-in-law Joni (Toni Collette) and her daughter Meg (Katherine Langford); and even Marta Cabrera (Ana de Armas), Thrombey's in-home nurse.

Then there's the housekeeper Fran (Edi Patterson), who finds the body; Great Nana Wanetta (K Callan), who bears mute witness to the family squabbles; and Alan Stevens, the beleaguered attorney who must deliver the grim (for Thrombey's survivors) details of the writer's recently altered will.

I've been hearing such great things about this movie for so long, I'm still not sure why it took so long for my wife and I to sit down and watch it. (Short answer: We have 8-year-old twins.) But I'm so glad we finally found the time; Knives Out is an artfully made masterpiece.

Word is, a sequel is one the way -- although only one character, Craig's detective, will return.