Early on in Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) uncovers the ingredients of his latest murder case written on a piece of paper: a laundry list of literary classics, among them John Dickson Carr’s The Hollow Man, Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, and Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue. It’s a refreshing set of references to see – one that speaks to the stylistic breadth of the genre that’s so often forgotten. Christie is the heart of it, but not its totality.
Writer-director Rian Johnson gets it. It’s what’s made his Knives Out series feel like a fathomless well of grey matter entertainment. Knives Out, the original, was a classic, mahogany-panelled Christie riff; Glass Onion, its sequel, was a sunbaked, deluxe spin on The Last of Sheila (1973). Now Wake Up Dead Man offers Gothic flair, suitable for a year that’s already featured adaptations of Nosferatu and Frankenstein, with Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights on the horizon.
What’s clear, three films in, is that Johnson has crafted an ideal formula, rigid in some ways and malleable in others. Wake Up Dead Man is more sober than Glass Onion, more tonally aligned with Knives Out, not as clever as either in its solution and a little baggier in its delivery, yet more soulful in its concerns. All of that feels relatively negligible. The point is that this series is yet to stumble.
The most noteworthy aspect here is that, while every instalment has paired Benoit with a noble-hearted ally, previously played by Ana de Armas and Janelle Monáe, Wake Up Dead Man offers us the best of the lot. Josh O’Connor puts his crumpled brow and bashful smirk to particularly effective work as the timid Reverend Jud Duplenticy, a priest brought to an upstate church in a quest to find absolution for his violent past. In his words, he’s “young, dumb, and full of Christ”.
At the church, he finds himself railroaded by the usual, eccentric Knives Out archetypes: Glenn Close’s fervid Martha Delacroix; Andrew Scott’s washed-up sci-fi writer Lee Ross; Kerry Washington’s sharp-tongued lawyer Vera Draven and her influencer son Cy (Daryl McCormack), who dreams of a career in politics; Cailee Spaeny’s Simone Vivane, a disabled former concert cellist; and Jeremy Renner’s shifty Dr Nat Sharp.
All of them live under the Trumpian influence of Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin). He’s tagged their vulnerability, their desperation to escape the endlessly wanting, chattering modern world (for Lee, it’s a “last chance out of Substack hell”), and coddled them instead with the egotistical binaries of conservative faith – because why reflect on ourselves when we can spend all our time damning others?
O’Connor, as so beautifully demonstrated in last month’s The Mastermind, can play with contradictions like few others. Beneath Jud’s gentle, reedy voice, there is a clarity of thought and an assuredness that not only challenges Wicks’s dominance but also the strictly logical, atheist worldview of Benoit – who is called in to investigate when Wicks is offed in one of those “perfectly impossible” crimes and the accusatory finger inevitably swings around to point at Jud.
Johnson is both ruthless and sincere when it comes to faith’s moral worth. When Benoit delivers his final verdict, he does it from the pulpit. And yet, Wake Up Dead Man extends its usual punchline denouement with a poignant examination of what it means to be truly righteous in an unrighteous world. As Jud believes, “A priest is a shepherd. The world is a wolf.” Benoit Blanc, then, is a torch to guide us through the dark.
Dir: Rian Johnson. Starring: Daniel Craig, Josh O’Connor, Glenn Close, Josh Brolin, Mila Kunis, Jeremy Renner, Kerry Washington, Andrew Scott, Cailee Spaeny, Daryl McCormack, Thomas Haden Church. Cert 12A, 144 mins
