You wouldn’t normally hope for an anticipated cultural event to begin with a murder, but at this year’s London Film Festival, they’re readily kicking off proceedings with blood, death and a puzzlingly cryptic whodunnit. The man here to crack the case is Benoit Blanc, Daniel Craig’s Southern gentleman detective. And for the third in the Knives Out series, which will premiere on October 8th at the Royal Festival Hall for the LFF’s Opening Night Gala, he’s returning to solve his most ambitious and timely crime yet.
Written and directed once again by creator Rian Johnson, and produced by his longtime collaborator Ram Bergman, Knives Out: Wake Up Dead Man sees Craig and a stellar ensemble cast featuring Glenn Close, Josh Brolin, Josh O’Connor, Mila Kunis, Jeremy Renner and Andrew Scott gather in the fictional parochial town of Chimney Rock in upstate New York. There, Brolin’s territorial Monsignor Wicks leads his church - Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude - with unwavering control. When young priest Father Duplenticy (O’Connor) is dispatched to join him, suffice to say his arrival is not a welcome one.
For Johnson, the choice to set the third Knives Out film in the world of the church was a particularly personal one. Having grown up in a Protestant family, and now considering himself non-religious, the script gave him a chance to wrangle with his own opinions on faith. “It was a big, big part of my life when I was younger, and I have lots of family members I'm very close to who are still believers, so it's something I have really strong feelings about,” he explains. “It's also something that right now is very present in a lot of other spheres in our culture - definitely in the States, but also everywhere. Religion and politics, religion and society - right now, there's a lot of contact between them, so there's a lot to dig into on many levels.”
Though the Knives Out franchise deals in highly entertaining capers, with Benoit Blanc’s exaggerated Southern drawl at the campy centre of it all, Johnson is a firm believer in the ability of the murder mystery form to reflect the times. The original 2019 film contained plotlines of privilege and prejudice; 2022’s Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery was set during the Covid pandemic and centred around a tech billionaire, and now Wake Up Dead Man goes even further, bringing in ideas of social media destruction, radicalisation, and the corrupting influence of our most powerful leaders.
“For a long while, the majority of murder mysteries we saw were kind of timeless, cosy little movies that acted as if there were period pieces, encased in their own little world. But that's not what Agatha Christie was doing; she was speaking to her times, and I can't imagine ever making a movie where I wasn't driven by something that's present in life right now that I'm angry about or excited about or engaged with,” says Johnson. “The murder mystery form is incredibly suited to talking about shit that's going on, because the form itself is kind of a microcosm. You have a group of suspects, there's a power structure within that group, and the person at the top ends up dead with the question of what motivates these people to want to take that step. It's all so juicy and ripe to be plugged into things that are on our minds right now.”
With the fallout of Brolin’s division-stirring Monsignor Wicks at the heart of the film, it would not be too much of a stretch to guess which political leader has been on Johnson’s mind in particular. The director shrugs coyly at the suggestion. Trump himself has, of course, been causing his own stir amongst the film industry of late with the proposed introduction of a 100% tariff on non-US-made movies. “I don't know [what will happen], but I mean, the industry has gone through so much,” says Johnson. “The reality is that it’s a little bit like the weather. Rain or shine, you just have to figure out a way to still put on your picnic…”
Wake Up Dead Man’s particular picnic was a new challenge for Johnson and Bergman. Where their first film was shot on location in a Massachusetts mansion, and Glass Onion was filmed in Greece, their latest was shot over 50 days on studio stages in London. Having realised over each film that the key to the cast dynamic was in their ability to hang out and bond between takes, Bergman took it upon himself to create communal areas to keep people out of their trailers. “[On the first film] I said, ‘Wow, we wasted so much money on those fancy trailers because people just want to sit in the kitchen and share stories’,” Bergman laughs. “This time, there was Glenn and Cailee [Spenny] with their dogs and everyone’s just talking and having fun.”
There are standout turns in the film - O’Connor’s good-hearted priest with a troubled past; Close’s devoted Martha Delacroix, played with slow-burning brilliance - but Knives Out is a true ensemble piece. With Hollywood up in arms over Tilly Norwood, the industry’s first so-called ‘AI actor’, Johnson and Bergman are both hopeful that this chemistry is something AI can’t recreate. “We actually have a movie that we are producing and shooting next year, with Joseph Gordon-Levitt directing, that’s about that, and the danger of what’s coming,” Bergman reveals. “Eventually, AI is gonna penetrate more and more into our business, but hopefully you can figure out a way that it can penetrate with just certain helpful things, but not take over. Because really, all we wanna do is make cool stuff with cool people.”
“There's an alchemy to [acting]. With a movie like Wake Up Dead Man, you have all these actors, all bringing their own stuff into the scene; they're alive and they're bringing their experiences and doing shit that I could have never even have written,” says Johnson. “There's an element of chaos and of life to it that can't be faked.”
Knives Out: Wake Up Dead Man will premiere at the London Film Festival’s Opening Night Gala on October 8th at the Royal Festival Hall, and will be available on Netflix on Dec 12
