The criteria for the success of a Knives Out movie are both simple and next to impossible. People just want a ‘good old fashioned murder mystery’, and Rian Johnson has to oblige with a story that hangs together perfectly, ends with a twist that you didn’t see coming but *should* have based on the clues he left you, introduces you to a no-weak-links ensemble of suspects, and make you laugh. It’s a task he aced in the original before stumbling just a little with the too deconstruction-y Glass Onion, and now with Wake Up Dead Man, Johnson is back in the zone. The darkest Benoit Blanc mystery yet, it also might be our last, with Netflix’s contract with the franchise finished now, and it’s a fittingly punchy and melancholic note to go out on.
Daniel Craig once again dons his wonderful accent as Blanc, but the first big twist of Wake Up Dead Man is that this is just as much the Josh O’Connor Show as it is a Craig vehicle – Craig himself, meanwhile, gives his most quiet and contained Blanc performance yet. As Jud, the devout priest working in a small, conservative church in upstate New York, O’Connor fills the ‘sidekick’ role taken by Ana de Armas and Janelle Monae in the last two but, thanks to a bevy of flashbacks, Jud gets a whole heap of Blanc-less screentime too.
It’s a tough ask of O’Connor to steal the spotlight from one of the most beloved screen characters introduced in the past few years, but he succeeds with a mix of wit and tragic guilt, properly convincing us of Jud’s undying faith. And faith is the order of the day here, with the murder’s victim the parish Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin), a Trumpian despot spewing traditionalist rage from the pulpit, and the suspects all his most loyal listeners, from drunk divorced doctor Nat (Jeremy Renner) to conspiracist sci-fi writer Lee (Andrew Scott).
Wicks’s death is a ‘locked box’ mystery, seemingly somehow stabbed by nobody while resting in a side room, but it soon unfolds into something far darker and grander, rooted in the very history of the place. Though Blanc, a staunch rationalist, is quick to dismiss the religion at the heart of the case, Johnson is not, his earnest handling of faith adding new layers of darkness and emotional complexity to his otherwise enjoyably cartoon-y supporting cast.
If you found Glass Onion too ‘political’, Wake Up Dead Man lands somewhere between that and the original in terms of being informed by immediate current events. It’s still laden with real-world talk of division through bigotry and the misogyny of the Church, with the most devout parishioner, Martha (Glenn Close), being a woman devoid of sorority and happy to dismiss other women as ‘whores’, but its concerns feel more timeless than Glass Onion’s, less at risk of being instantly dated. With all this rattling around, it should come as little surprise that this is the least funny Knives Out entry by far, but you don’t miss the laughs too much and Johnson does still pepper some great jokes in there.
Buoyed by a sense of the supernatural pervading the setting (though, let’s be clear, there is no mystic business actually happening in the plot), Wake Up Dead Man can feel faintly ludicrous at times, but its rich emotional core and evocatively primal visuals keeps it grounded and thrilling. With any story of faith must come a theme of uncertainty, which is an unfamiliar ingredient in Johnson and Craig’s recipe but one that allows the Knives Out formula to evolve, avoiding repetition without abandoning the core principles. I hope this isn’t goodbye to Benoit Blanc but, if it is, Wake Up Dead Man is a powerful goodbye, soaked in rain and mud yet lighted by grace.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 