The following contains spoilers for Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery.

Rian Johnson and his whodunit mystery series Knives Out are back with Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery. Daniel Craig returns as "gentleman detective" Benoit Blanc with a new case: a group of old friends who call themselves "the Disruptors" gathered on a private island in Greece mid-pandemic by their billionaire leader Miles Bron (Edward Norton) to play a special murder mystery game. Blanc's unexpected presence on the island, though, puts everyone on high alert; Bron writes it off by assuming that one of his friends might actually be trying to kill him that weekend, but a mid-movie subversion reveals the truth. Helen Brand (Janelle Monáe), the identical twin sister of Bron's former business partner Andi, hired Blanc to investigate Andi's mysterious suicide -- and got invited along to help him obtain clues.

Monáe's Brand is triumphant at the end of Glass Onion when she discovers that Bron did, in fact, murder Andi after she threatened to expose the dangers of his new invention Klear to the public and prove her creative ownership of Alpha. Glass Onion is similar to Knives Out in that regard, where Ana de Armas' Marta Cabrera is found wholly innocent of her employer Harlan Thrombey's (Christopher Plummer) death -- and remains the sole heir to his fortune. The leading ladies of the Knives Out series provide great representation for working-class women of color since they get to enact their agency and have their revenge in their respective films.

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Knives Out Made Outsider Marta Cabrera the Hero

Johnson didn't always have such skill in representing women of color in his movies, though. In his Star Wars film The Last Jedi, Rose Tico (Kelly Marie Tran) received an inordinate amount of sexist and racist backlash from fans online. There's no denying that The Last Jedi -- and Johnson and Lucasfilm's mishandling of the situation -- was notorious for intensifying sexism and racism, but Marta Cabrera of Knives Out was a great move for the Latina and Hispanic women in Hollywood. A historically underrepresented group -- Latina characters make up just shy of 2 percent of leads and co-leads in film as of 2020 -- Cabrera's influential role in the whodunit took her beyond the stereotypical "Hispanic maid" character by making her the hero.

When the wealthy, privileged Thrombey family consistently can't remember what country Cabrera and her family immigrated from, nefariously accuses her of being a gold digger and bends over backward to "prove" she murdered Harlan, Johnson suggests that the stereotypes Hollywood and the general public circulate about Hispanic and Latina women -- and immigrants -- are misguided. Cabrera isn't any of those things: she was a genuine friend and a hard worker who got blindsided by the very people who claimed to see her as one of them. The audience roots for Cabrera as she seeks to craft her false alibi at Harlan's direction.

The audience knows from very early on that Cabrera is innocent: even if she did give Harlan too much morphine, it was entirely accidental. But like Blanc reminds the police and Cabrera at the end of Knives Out, Cabrera is a good nurse; she knew the correct vials of medication by their viscosity, and the toxicology report would have proven her innocence. That Harlan trusts Cabrera so much to want her to avoid being a suspect, and that he wants her to be the sole beneficiary of his will instead of his privileged, over-reliant family in the first place gets the audience on Cabrera's side from the very beginning until the iconic closing scene where she looks down on the Thrombey family from her new balcony. It's the ultimate act of revenge where she claims victory over the wealthy, upper-class family who tried to screw her over and get her mother deported.

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Helen Brand Gets Justice in Glass Onion

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Glass Onion's Helen Brand gets to have a similar moment of fiery revenge. Shortly after the trial ousting her from Alpha where their friends claimed Bron made the initial plan for the company, Andi discovered the original cocktail napkin she wrote a decade earlier. Brand finds Andi's napkin hidden in Bron's office and shows it to the group, but even that's not enough to make them testify against Bron, who torches the napkin. Furious, Brand destroys his art pieces and starts a fire that sends the mansion and the literal Mona Lisa up in flames and gets the Disruptors on her side. Brand sits with Blanc and waits for the police to show up, and she does so with the knowledge that she got justice for her sister's murder and took down the people who refused to stand up for Andi when push came to shove.

What makes Andi's murder and trial so tragic is that Bron so clearly singled her out and made the Disruptors gang up on her. In their group, much like Cabrera in Knives Out, Andi is the only woman of color, as a Black woman. She is the Other, who Bron finds easy to set up and later kill even though she was the glue of the Disruptors and the one who created their company. The Thrombey family similarly uses Cabrera's mother's undocumented status against her as a way to get the inheritance out of her pocket and keep it in their family against Harlan's wishes. The decision to write Cabrera as Hispanic and an immigrant and Brand as a Black woman feels purposeful in the films' examinations of the intersection between whiteness, affluence and privilege.

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Knives Out and Glass Onion Lift Up Working-Class Women of Color

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Women of color -- and working-class women of color, especially -- are the unequivocal heroes of the Knives Out series, and Johnson provides fantastic representation for them that the rest of Hollywood will hopefully follow suit. Cabrera is a personal nurse for Harlan in his old age, and Brand is a schoolteacher from Alabama. They're outsiders in the world of real estate moguls, publishing executives, politicians, top scientists and the like to whom the Thrombey family and Disruptors belong, making them easier targets to shuffle blame onto when the going gets especially tough.

While a lesser movie might veer squarely into white savior territory with Blanc as the "hero of the day" to make all the final connections between motive and opportunity, Knives Out and Glass Onion never succumb to that trope. That's probably because Blanc always makes it a point to involve Cabrera and Brand in his investigation so that they're equal participants in unraveling a crime that directly affects them and their livelihoods. Blanc makes that much clear to Brand in Glass Onion when he tells her that all he can do is uncover the truth and get the case to a point -- not actually get justice for her. Cabrera's quick thinking to get Ransom (Chris Evans) to confess to murder and Brand's clue-hunting and disguise as Andi make them agents of their own justice in a refreshing way.

The whodunit genre the films are a part of actually makes perfect sense for a working-class woman of color to be victorious at the end of the day: in a world both lived and fictional where women of color's voices and concerns get sidelined by institutions, it feels vindicating to watch a woman of color's quest for truth and justice get realized. For Cabrera, proving her innocence in Harlan's death isn't just to get the money -- it's to protect her family. For Brand, finding out who killed her sister Andi is about making sure Bron and the Disruptors are held accountable for Andi's murder and their respective crimes. Johnson's dedication toward providing women of color with roles where they get to have tangible agency in Knives Out is a great step forward for representation in Hollywood at large.

You can catch Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery on Netflix beginning Dec. 23.