Review #321: It's a Wonderful Knife (2023)

The Twelve Slays of Christmas #7 - It's A Wonderful Knife (2023)

[This movie doesn't appear to be streaming anywhere for free; it's on most platforms with a subscription, so if you subscribe to Amazon Prime, Hulu, Roku, Philo, Disney+, or AMC+, it should be included in your subscription.]

This movie came recommended from a source I respect very much; the concept drew me in instantly. However, as it went on I had some serious issues I'll need to address, and that means I'm going to need to spoil some (but not all) of the plot in the process. This is a relatively new film so fair warning, vague spoilers ahead.

It's A Wonderful Knife follows the story of Winnie, a girl in a small town that gets beset upon by a serial killer on Christmas Eve. Winnie manages to kill the masked murderer, and a year later is still troubled by the loss of the people he killed. In a moment of anguish at how people treat her, she wishes she were never born- and she gets her wish, suddenly finding herself in a timeline where she never existed. But the problem is, that means the killer is still out there, and has killed far, far more people in the year following his original defeat- so Winnie must make a new friend to help her figure out how to stop the killer again and get back to her original timeline.

When I was first told the premise for this movie, I was immediately on board. I think it's a great concept, and was excited to see where it went! And the first half of the movie was interesting, I was still on board. The real problem, though, is that the second half of the movie not only has the characters do some incredibly idiotic things that made my wife and me both unable to take the story seriously, but the ending also makes no sense and seems to completely miss the point of the first half. But it's worse than that: while I love the premise for this movie, I kind of feel like the movie squanders it.

Obviously this movie is a twist on It's A Wonderful Life, where George Bailey wishes he'd never been born and he sees how much worse everybody's life would be if he wasn't there to touch their lives and help them all be who they could be. This movie follows that on a surface level, but when you really get down to it, it's not about how Winnie touched the lives of so many people- it's pretty much entirely about how this killer has affected their lives, and Winnie's only connection is that she's the one who stopped the killer. With one exception that I can think of, nobody in this picture has any change to their life that wasn't brought about within the last year. Basically every single thing that happens differently happened because the serial killer killed X person or Y person, and therefore their life is worse. Did Winnie never affect anyone's lives before stopping that killer? The first half of the movie works so hard to establish how devastated Winnie is because her best friend was one of the first murder victims; but once she makes her wish, her friend is mentioned (if I recall) one single time, and nothing is said about how her short life was different without Winnie there. 

I figure this is probably because the premise of the movie means that her friend is still going to be dead when Winnie goes back to her timeline (since logic would dictate that if she was one of the killer's first victims, she would still be one of the first victims if the killer wasn't stopped) but could the writers not have changed that? They spent so much time building up this relationship, would it not have been possible to write it so that Winnie's absence led to different enough circumstances that for whatever reason she wasn't targeted by the killer? Then you can have the emotional struggle of Winnie knowing that the world is worse without her there, but it means that her friend is still alive. That's obviously not the story these filmmakers wanted to tell (instead having her fall in love with some other character and explore that relationship) but then why spend so much time in the first half building up this friendship? (Plus, the plot I just described writes itself. How do you write a story about Winnie's best friend being killed and then Winnie visits an alternate timeline and NOT have the story revolve around her friend being alive again? The movie they actually made was surely much more difficult to write.)

But, again, I can't stress how weird it feels that (with the exception of her ex-boyfriend who has now been free to date his soulmate for the past three years) NOTHING in this movie comments on anything that happened before the killer showed up. In It's A Wonderful Life, many people's entire lives had been different because George wasn't there. In It's A Wonderful Knife, everyone was basically the same until one specific thing Winnie did her last year in high school. Her brother's absence (him being a new victim due to Winnie's absence) made a more profound impact than anything intrinsic to Winnie, and that's absurd.

There's also some huge problems with the ending. The ending just kind of forgets or ignores how shitty everyone was to Winnie in the first half of the movie (like how her parents gave her a jogging suit, but gave her brother a $70k truck) and it also foregoes having Winnie go to therapy for the trauma she's clearly still dealing with, because hey, she had a cool dream so now she's happy again and that's all that matters. And then- unless I TOTALLY misread what was going on- the ending also implies that Bernie (the girl that Winnie saved in the alternate timeline and fell in love with) ALSO remembers the events of the alternate timeline, which raises SO MANY QUESTIONS (like how my wife asked during the film, "So is the original Bernie just... dead, or something?") and honestly feels like a hastily-written cop-out more than anything else.

So in conclusion, this movie has some serious issues. It looks good, it sounds good (the soundtrack is actually really, really good), and has a fantastic premise, but I feel like the plot is incredibly muddled and the characters and events make less sense the more you think about them. Maybe if you can turn your brain off this would be a really fun movie, but any kind of analysis makes it just fall apart.

Overall Rating: 4/10 Justin's Long Teeth

Reference Within an Easter Egg: Apparently, the killer's white costume in this film is an homage to the original script for 1996's Scream, when Ghostface was originally written to be wearing all white (before it was changed to black because "black would look scarier").