THE STORY – Benoit Blanc faces his most dangerous mystery yet in the latest entry in Rian Johnson’s beloved Knives Out series.
THE CAST – Daniel Craig, Josh O’Connor, Glenn Close, Josh Brolin, Mila Kunis, Jeremy Renner, Kerry Washington, Andrew Scott, Cailee Spaeny, Daryl McCormack & Thomas Haden Church
THE TEAM – Rian Johnson (Writer/Director)
THE RUNNING TIME – 144 Minutes
“Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery” has the highest degree of difficulty of the three films in Rian Johnson’s “Knives Out” franchise, simply by virtue of being the third. After two expectation-defying all-star murder mysteries, the audience knows what to expect. In order to keep us invested and stay two steps ahead, Johnson essentially has to rewrite all the rules he set up in the previous two films, while still creating something that feels like it comes from the same universe. Mission: Accomplished. “Wake Up Dead Man” finds Johnson expanding his reference pool from Agatha Christie to Edgar Allen Poe, G.K. Chesterton, and John Dickson Carr while still keeping his own zippy style and relevant sociopolitical commentary. Johnson has set a high bar for himself, but he clears it with relative ease, remixing stock characters and tropes from decades of genre fiction like a mad cinematic DJ, coming up with something indebted to the past while still being surprising and relevant in the present. Given its solid craft and timeless message, it will likely age extremely well in the future.
Reverend Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor) didn’t want to be placed with Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin) at Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude. But after he punched another priest in the face, it became his punishment. The former boxer has been trying to make the most of it, but Wicks’s fiery homilies have driven away most of the congregants, leaving only a select few in the inner circle: Vera Draven (Kerry Washington), Wicks’s family attorney, and her politically-minded conservative influencer son Cyrus (Daryl McCormack); middling sci-fi author Lee Ross (Andrew Scott), Dr. Nat Sharp (Jeremy Renner), whose wife recently took their kids and left him, causing him to turn to the bottle; Simone Vivane (Cailee Spaeny), a wheelchair-bound cellist suffering from painful nerve damage; and the staff members, devout church manager and organ player Martha (Glenn Close) and groundskeeper Samson Holt (Thomas Haden Church). When the Monsignor is stabbed to death in a closet off to the side of the pulpit after a particularly vociferous homily on Good Friday, Father Jud becomes the prime suspect. Local cop Geraldine (Mila Kunis) brings in Benoît Blanc (Daniel Craig) to help solve this seemingly unsolvable case, and they quickly learn that nearly all the church regulars had the motive to kill Wicks. The question is, which of them did it and how?
As usual, Johnson wears his influences proudly on his sleeve, calling them out directly in the film. Blanc immediately recognizes “The Black Friday Murder” (as Jud calls it) as a locked-room mystery, and makes a show of running through all the possible solutions before realizing that none of them aligns with the available evidence. This crisis of faith leads to revelations that Blanc doesn’t expect about himself and his work, as Jud takes his ego and love of theatricality to task. O’Connor’s earnestness as Jud is a huge boon to the film, as he fills the requisite role of audience surrogate/civilian partner to Blanc with an abundance of good humor and screen presence. He’s also a fantastic physical comedian, hilariously jumping with a fright whenever the Mrs. Danvers-styled Martha pops into a scene out of nowhere (which she does with regularity). He and Craig have great chemistry onscreen as the two men challenge each other and get under one another’s skin. Father Jud is the film’s driving force, and O’Connor’s endearing puppy dog qualities make him a delight to spend time with, even during this dark night of the soul.
As with the previous films in the series, the starry ensemble is the main draw for most audiences, but half of them don’t have very much to do. The biggest victims of limited screentime here – namely Haden Church, Scott, and Spaeny – all still get one big moment to make an impression, and they all take that moment by the throat. It’s fun to see Scott play so far against type as the author who has “unplugged from the liberal hive mind,” and Spaeny’s tremulous strength is put to excellent use as the musician desperate for a cure for her pain, but it’s unfortunate that their characters get sidelined for the majority of the investigation. Of the showier roles, Washington gets to show the most range, getting a cheer-worthy moment mid-film that recalls her forceful, fast-paced work on “Scandal,” and Close is having the most fun, hamming it up as the biggest true believer of the group (the title derives from her grief-stricken belief that Wicks will rise again on Easter Sunday, just like Jesus). The rest are all fun to watch, and while the repartee isn’t as sparkling as it was in “Glass Onion,” the scenes with the full ensemble present pulse with electricity.
The plot of “Wake Up Dead Man” is the most straightforward and thematically dense in the series to date, abandoning the structural gamesmanship of “Glass Onion” and expanding the tight focus of “Knives Out.” The main target of the film’s sociopolitical commentary is religion, specifically the direction of the Catholic Church in society. Father Jud found salvation in Christ’s love and wants to lead with that love, serving the community by bringing sinners to the light. Wicks, meanwhile, believes that the Church is engaged in a war, not just for people’s souls, but for power, and he’s unafraid to use every emotion in his toolbox to manipulate people in a direction that serves his ministry. Johnson mercilessly slices through those who would pervert Christ’s teachings to focus on hate, making an explicit connection between these kinds of preachers and politicians who stoke fear and hatred in their constituents’ hearts in order to further their own power.
There’s little that is less Christlike than the lust for power, although Johnson blessedly refrains from didactically citing chapter and verse in shooting down his targets. Instead, he acts as a priest, appealing to people’s better natures with gentle reminders of the core principles of Christianity, namely that Jesus loved everyone, especially the sinners. Blanc, whose mother was extremely religious, has some understandably negative feelings towards organized religion, noting that it’s really just glorified storytelling, from the design of the church building to the performative homilies and ritualistic practices. In that way, going to the cinema is like going to church, and Johnson is our reverend, blessing us in the name of the father (the director), the son (the writer), and the Holy Spirit (the star). Praise his name, and may God bless us with as many “Knives Out” mysteries as the man wants to make. “Wake Up Dead Man” proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that when it comes to cinematic murder mysteries, nobody does it better.
