I don’t love being told what to do, but this week I have been told pretty aggressively by billboards, my Netflix homepage and all of my newsfeeds to watch Glass Onion so – because I was planning to anyway – I did. Two and a half times.

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The cosy crime satire is a sequel to 2019’s hit film Knives Out, and once again stars Daniel Craig as modern-day detective extraordinaire Benoit Blanc. In it, an eclectic group of “disruptors” are invited to a private island by billionaire Miles Bron (Edward Norton) to spend a weekend solving a mystery game he’s set up centred around his own (pretend) murder. As you would expect, things don’t go to plan and soon the bodies start piling up.

In between the hijinks, the twists, and the mile-a-minute pop culture references, the thing that took me most by surprise, however, was how much I liked that it was set in the first year of the pandemic. As soon as the May 2020 title went up my brain flickered – was this film going to pretend the last few years haven’t happened, or lean into it?

All fiction films set in the real world from 2020 onwards are going to have to make a choice – ignore, acknowledge or else take place in an alternate reality where COVID-19 never happened.

I’m not ready for earnest movies that centre on lockdowns, but at the same time I rankle at the idea of a story that takes place in a 2021 where people still associate the word “quarantine” with boats from the 1800s. In this arena, at least until this weekend, I was that frustrating friend who when you ask what they want to eat says, “I don’t mind”, followed by a list of the things they don’t want but offer no suggestions beyond that.

Turns out, what I wanted was a little bit of a nod, and then for the plot to move on.

In Glass Onion, the pandemic is part of the background but not the focus. Early on, in the scene where the characters are shown together for the first time, their choices about face coverings lets us know just who they are.