Review: It’s A Wonderful Knife
If you love Freaky, Happy Death Day, Totally Killer, and Hallmark movies, then It’s A Wonderful Knife is the movie for you. Michael Kennedy is back with another killer slasher comedy. Shot like a Hallmark movie with a distinctly gory twist, this film is destined to be a new holiday classic.
Winnie (Jane Widdop) is a queer teen that lives in Angel Falls, a cookie-cutter town full of cookie-cutter families. The town’s mayor (Justin Long) has been gentrifying the area by buying all of the properties around town. All together, Angel Falls is your typical upper-middle-class American town, or it was until a killer angel began slaughtering local teens. This film does something really interesting with its killer, however. We find out who the killer is within the first fifteen minutes of the film. Winnie kills him and saves the town. It’s a genius movie that makes the movie far more sinister and suspenseful. We cut to a year later, Winnie is incredibly depressed. Her family won’t let her talk about the horrors she experienced and she feels completely alone. Winnie wishes on the northern lights that she was never born.
Like many Christmas films before, It’s A Wonderful Knife gets to the heart of the holiday. Knife does this in a modern way that takes no prisoners. This film takes a stab at many important issues, including gentrification. Mayor Waters is a spray-tanned, Trump-esque creep. He bullies small business owners in order to bring in bigger businesses. The film calls out corporate capitalist Christmas in America, and how it affects small towns nationwide. The film also comes from a queer perspective. The holiday season can often be difficult for queer people, especially if they are not close to their families. Christianity and Catholicism have a history of homophobic rhetoric, so Christian holidays can be especially hard. Making the slasher dress as an angel was a perfect choice. Religion can frequently feel like the villain in a queer person’s story. Kennedy turning an angel into a monster pokes fun at this.
This cast is absolutely stacked. Katherine Isabelle plays the cool lesbian aunt we all wish we had, Gale Prescott (can you tell this film was written by a Scream fan?). Gale helps Winnie throughout the film and is one of the only role models Winnie has. Jess McLeod plays an outcast named Bernie, or as the townspeople call them, “Weirdo.” McLeod is able to make this awkward, nervous misfit a sympathetic and lovable character that I think many queer teens will relate to. I will say that Winnie definitely feels more like a millennial than a teenager to me, but she is still a great final girl. Widdop gives an incredibly emotional performance of a young person discovering that her life matters.
While the film quite literally states the message multiple times, it’s an important one: you matter. Winnie learns how many lives she unknowingly impacted when she existed. The world without her is horrific and depressing. Her town has completely changed. Because she wasn’t there, the killer was able to continue their killing spree and take over the town. This is an incredibly prominent message for a queer film. “LGBTQ youth are more than four times as likely to attempt suicide than their peers,” according to the Trevor Project. It’s a Wonderful Knife presents the sentiment from It’s A Wonderful Life through a uniquely queer lens. Winnie is a queer teenager that learns just how much she matters. It is a beautiful story, one that queer youth absolutely need.
Support queer films made by queer people. It’s A Wonderful Knife is in theatres now.
