It doesn’t feel hyperbolic to say that the Knives Out franchise has given us one of the decade’s best characters. Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc is a delightful enigma of a man, who we (and the team bringing him to life) learn more about with each new installment.
The third title in Rian Johnson’s film saga, Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, is finally on Netflix after its brief run in theaters, and it delivers a lot of new layers for Blanc. As people continue to debate about his hair and wardrobe choices, or his viewpoints on religion, there is one continued detail about him that I can’t get enough of: his love of musical theatre.
***Spoilers for Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery below!***
The trend began with Blanc’s debut in 2019’s Knives Out, in a relatively-small moment that cuts the tension of the murder mystery. As Marta Cabrera (Ana de Armas) deals with an emergency that she believes could further implicate her in the case, the film quickly cuts back to Blanc waiting patiently in her car. He is listening to music on his headphones — more specifically, “Losing My Mind” from Stephen Sondheim’s 1971 musical Follies — and singing from the top of his lungs, unaware that something bad is happening just feet away.
Cut to 2022’s Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, and Blanc dealing with being depressed and bored during the height of COVID-19 lockdown. As he sits in the bathtub for weeks to pass the time, one of his hobbies includes playing Among Us (even though he’s not very good at it) with a group of celebrities on Zoom… including Sondheim himself.
The Drama!
And then there’s Wake Up Dead Man. Its first use of musical theatre emulates the same sort of cutaway gag as Knives Out, in a scene between Blanc and Reverend Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor). When Blanc deduces that Jud is innocent, and rushes to stop him from confessing to the police, he shoves him into his car and decides to drive to the house of the actual guilty party, Dr. Nat Sharp (Jeremy Renner). When he turns on the car, a CD briefly autoplays “Skimbleshanks: The Railway Cat”, from none other than Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1981 musical Cats.
Then, during the film’s third act, Blanc once again uses a recognizable musical number to stop Jud from confessing. While everyone is gathered in the church that is a major centerpiece of the film, Jud starts to assume guilt for the various deaths of the film… but is stopped by Blanc playing the church organ before he can utter a word. More specifically, he plays the titular musical motif from Webber’s 1986 musical The Phantom of the Opera.
Back in 2019, Johnson revealed that the Follies needle drop was his attempt to pay homage to Sondheim, who was an “avowed mystery nut and puzzle nut.” (In addition to his musicals, Sondheim co-wrote the 1973 murder mystery film The Last of Sheila, which the Knives Out franchise has homaged multiple times over.) But as these films have evolved, the random nods to musical theatre have only gotten more endearing and unhinged. Wake Up Dead Man‘s Cats moment, in particular, being in such close proximity to bodies being found dissolved in acid is such a perfect beat of tonal dissonance.
It makes sense, on so many levels, that Blanc would be a musical fan. In a lot of ways, a good musical theatre composition unfolds similarly to a puzzle, with different motivations and motifs leading audiences into places that they might not expect. It’s also safe to say that Blanc has a flair for the dramatic, electing to reveal the killer in the most grandiose and satisfying way, as opposed to right when he deduces it.
He’s even unafraid to put on an act for the sake of the mystery, as evident by him scheming with Helen for the entirety of Glass Onion, and by his fake religious epiphany in Wake Up Dead Man, which allows the room to clear so the real killer can be revealed. It’s such a great detail that makes Blanc, with his witty one-liners and Foghorn Leghorn-esque accent, feel like even more of a human being. And it makes me eager to see what musical might get referenced in the inevitable Knives Out 4.
(featured image: Netflix)
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