Summary
Wake Up Dead Man is the best Knives Out mystery by a margin, or at the very least the most satisfyingly curious – and about much more than murder.
Wake Up Dead Man is the first Knives Out Mystery to realise that Daniel Craig’s eccentric detective Benoit Blanc is the least interesting thing about them. As much as everyone loved the first Knives Out, a tight whodunit making fun of greedy neoliberal caricatures, Glass Onion felt like a case of diminishing returns, the Netflix association and winking tech mogul victim feeling a bit too cynical and contemporary for such a cosy throwback mystery. That formula wouldn’t have worked again, I don’t think, so I’m glad that this movie, which is comfortably the best of the three, doesn’t adhere so closely to it. The outline is there in its broad strokes – a murder, a tight-knit group of suspects who all have a motive for it, each played by a recognisable Hollywood star – but in the middle is a surprisingly curious, even-handed exploration of faith and community. In a trilogy so eager for Blanc to gather everyone in a room to theatrically explain what happened and why, it’s surprisingly satisfying to hear him admit that there are some mysteries even he can’t solve.
Blanc doesn’t even show up for about 40 minutes of the expansive 144-minute runtime, by which point viewers have been firmly situated in the perspective of Father Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor, The Crown), an internally conflicted priest who found Christ after his early career as a boxer resulted in tragedy. Blanc is one of those franchise characters – like, say, Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean – who don’t work on their own terms. Their affectations are put to use driving the stories of others, which has been true of the other movies in Rian Johnson’s trilogy to varying degrees. But whereas those prior mysteries were largely about classism, with the audience aligned with a handy working-class POV surrogate, this one is about religion, with Duplenticy trapped between exploitative fire-and-brimstone conservative Catholicism and a softer, more idealised version of piety that he believes has saved his life and, crucially, can be used to save the lives of others.
Given his view of the church’s responsibilities and his propensity to give deacons who cross the line a right hook, Duplenticy is despatched by Bishop Langstrom (Jeffrey Wright, who steals both of the scenes he’s in) to a small parish in New York, where a megalomaniacal Monsignor, Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin, Avengers: Endgame, Outer Range), is using his status and aggressive rhetoric to keep a terrified clutch of regular parishioners under his sway. Duplenticy recognises immediately – and rightly – that he’s manipulating them for his own ends, but proving that is easier said than done, and convincing the churchgoers of it is harder still.
Needless to say, when Wicks turns up dead with a knife in his back, Duplenticy becomes the prime suspect. He abhorred Wicks’s politics, was witnessed arguing with him, and has been seen to try and sway his most ardent followers, who naturally all constitute suspects themselves. As with any Knives Out movie, the coterie of stars playing exaggerated cliches is one of the key selling points, and Wake Up Dead Man has a glittering line-up. There’s Wick’s right-hand woman, Martha (Glenn Close, in a project much worthier of her talents than Ryan Murphy’s All’s Fair), and her groundskeeper partner, Samson (Thomas Haden Church, last seen on Netflix in Tires). There’s also Dr. Nat Sharp (Jeremy Renner, Mayor of Kingstown), whose messy divorce is turning him into a misogynist, author Lee Ross (Andrew Scott, Back in Action), whose floundering literary career might be revitalised by a magnum opus written at Wick’s feet, cynical aspiring politician Cy Draven (Daryl McCormack, Bad Sisters) and his adoptive mother Vera (Kerry Washington, Little Fires Everywhere), and Simone Vivane (Cailee Spaeny), a cellist of some considerable renown now suffering from chronic pain that she has been duped into believing Wicks can miraculously cure – just so long as she spends her considerable savings on propping up his parish.
Josh O’Connor and Daniel Craig in Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery | Image via Netflix
Wicks’s murder is investigated by the local police chief, Geraldine Scott (Mila Kunis), and eventually by Blanc, who turns up out of the blue and begins putting the pieces together with Duplenticy and, of course, the audience. Wicks was killed in a locked room in seemingly impossible circumstances, giving the crime even more of a classic mystery feel than usual, and before long, multiple competing motives and possibilities have all been introduced. The pieces are there in such abundance that the whole thing could conceivably be figured out after the first hour, but it won’t be, since the ultimate outcome is, as ever, deliberately and winkingly obtuse. Johnson’s generosity with clues and details – and the fairness in how he constructs his mysteries – is eclipsed only by his sheer determination to make them virtually impossible to solve, even for ardent home sleuths.
But the how and the who are less pressing concerns than the why, and even that falls by the wayside a little in this instalment in favour of allowing Blanc and Duplenticy to form a fun double-act, where the stringently non-believing detective gradually warms to Duplenticy’s gently earnest idea of faith. A lesser movie would have taken a side here, probably Blanc’s, but the master stroke of Wake Up Dead Man is that it treats Duplenticy’s authentic belief as seriously as his critique of Wicks’s exploitative fearmongering. This isn’t a snooty anti-faith movie; on the contrary, I, as an atheist, found Duplenticy’s viewpoint more compelling than even Blanc’s.
By positioning Wicks at the head of a parish of susceptible self-serving idiots, the film also positions religion as the driving force behind bigotry and greed, especially the kind loosely disguised as altruism or divine mandate. In many ways, this clutch of characters is pushing the same ideas as those in the previous movies; they rail against feminism, Marxism, and socialism, against loose women and liberal hive minds. They’re easy targets, but Wicks represents a deeper malady, a more longstanding corruption draped in holy orders, and that makes the movie’s underlying conflict more textured, less arch, and harder to reconcile.
This is why, I think, Wake Up Dead Man is the best Knives Out mystery. Instead of letting Blanc bowl in and mock the whole thing, it instead slightly sidelines him to offer up another perspective, one centred on grace, tenderness, and understanding. It’s obvious from the very beginning that this is Father Jud’s movie, and not just because he’s accused of the crime at its core. It speaks in his voice, both aloud and through implication, but most importantly of all, it gives Blanc the good sense to listen.
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