Mark Reviews Movies: ALL THE OLD KNIVES

All the Old Knives, Amazon Studios

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 7, 2022

At its core, All the Old Knives is a mystery about espionage. In it, a CIA agent is tasked with uncovering the identity of a mole, whose betrayal almost certainly resulted in the deaths of more than 100 people during the hijacking of a plane.

This event occurred eight years before the agent's investigation begins, so the details aren't as clear as they might have been. Documents only tell so much, and memories are so muddled by time that they aren't much more help. Then, there's the trauma of being part of this tragedy, as well as the guilt, regret, and uncertainty of failing so many people—men, women, children, all of their friends and families.

That last part of the equation in Olen Steinhauer's screenplay (based on his novel of the same name) is what sticks as the clues are revealed, motives are uncovered and called into question, and a clear timeline—of what happened, what went wrong, and how the unknown mole enabled the killings—comes into focus. The mystery itself, especially in how Steinhauer and director Janus Metz allow it to be pieced together, is intriguing.

There's more beneath the surface of that unraveling plot here, though. That human element—of emotional vulnerability and the frailty that results when certain, foundational ideals come into conflict with each other—makes this a haunting and unexpectedly thoughtful tale, too.

The man at the center of the investigation is Henry Pelham (Chris Pine), who was a skilled field agent at the time of the hijacking. Since then, though, he has taken an office job. At the start, all we know of the hijacking in Vienna eight years prior is that the CIA office there could only stand in a meeting room, as word arrived that all four hijackers, the passengers, and the crew onboard the plane were dead. There was nothing left for Henry and the other members of the team to do, and Celia Harrison (Thandiwe Newton), another agent, ran out of the building to eventually start a normal life in California.

In the present-day part of the story, Henry's boss Vick Wallinger (Laurence Fishburne), who was charge of the team on the failed hijacking response, tells him that the agency is re-opening the case. The decision is based on new evidence that someone inside the Vienna field office might have contacted the head of the terrorist organization that committed the crime.

It's Henry's job to find and question the two top suspects: Bill Compton (Jonathan Pryce), whose phone line was used to call someone in Tehran, and Celia, whose abandonment of her career now appears more than a bit suspicious. Complicating matters for the investigator/interrogator is that Henry and Celia were lovers at the time of the hijacking. She didn't just leave her job. Celia left him and their relationship behind, too.

The rest of the plot revolves around an all-day meeting between Henry and Celia at a restaurant somewhere in California wine country. The two catch up on their lives. Henry drops what his actual intentions are, and from there, the conversation becomes a tricky balance of fact-finding, looking for potential holes in Celia's narrative, and this aching sense that, for all of the time that has passed and the changes that have occurred for these two, there's a series of deeper, unanswered questions about how and why the floor dropped under their relationship.

Here, it should be said that Pine and Newton, who spend a good portion of the film staring at and speaking to each other from across a table, are quite good here. Both performances require a certain level of evasion (It is a mystery, after all, about lies, the truth, and plenty of half-truths) but an underlying sense of openness about their characters' regrets and grief, regarding the fate of their romance and the ways they might have failed so many innocent people.

The past resonates here—not only because the other sections of the story are filled with intertwining flashbacks (to the mission to stop the hijacking, some events leading up to it, and Henry's interrogation of Bill), but also because this story acknowledges and confronts the psychological scars of these wounds of failure. We learn that the hijacking resulted in one agent's death by suicide, while others, like Henry, took those comfortable desk jobs.

Celia's seemingly ideal life, married and with two kids, is marred by a recurring nightmare, in which she is one of the passengers on the hijacked plane, helpless as one of her children is pulled away from her and toward inevitable death. Henry has his own ghosts: Outside of his uncertainty about what happened to his relationship with Celia, he also knows that, in some way, the hijacking resulted from a past betrayal, made on orders from on high for political reasons that eventually collapsed.

Such matters aren't the focus of Steinhauer's twisting and turning screenplay, which is smart in how, when, and why it reveals and obscures information over the course of its overlapping timelines. They are, though, a driving force behind the central conversation, between two intelligent and wounded people, as they try to make sense of what they don't know and, in the film's final revelation, what they do—but, because of all of this pain and doubt, can't bring themselves to speak until it's too late. All the Old Knives, then, is a fine mystery, and that's mostly on account of what's happening between the lines of its puzzle.

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