Rian Johnson conjures a deliciously Gothic mystery with a winning turn from Josh O’Connor. Here’s our Wake Up Dead Man review. Ho ho ho. He he he. Ha ha ha. Those are just a small selection of the noises you’ll make watching Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, a gothic New York State ... Knives Out: Wake Up Dead Man review | A miracle of a murder
Rian Johnson conjures a deliciously Gothic mystery with a winning turn from Josh O’Connor. Here’s our Wake Up Dead Man review.
Ho ho ho. He he he. Ha ha ha.
Those are just a small selection of the noises you’ll make watching Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, a gothic New York State puzzle box best seen while rubbing your hands together with a stupid-big grin on your face. After seeking out some pandemic-era sun in 2022’s Glass Onion, Daniel Craig’s inexplicably Southern detective Benoit Blanc is back on home turf in the cloudy Northeastern US. And, would you believe it, there’s been a murder…
The setting this time around is a quaint and unassuming church, Our Lady of Perpetual Grace, where boxer-turned-priest Reverend Jud (Josh O’Connor) has been sent to grow the Catholic congregation under the tyrannical thumb of a fire and brimstone preacher, Monsignor Wicks (Josh Brolin). It’s a place where shafts of sunlight only rarely break through everlasting cloud (it was, of course, filmed here in the UK), and where worshippers gather in front of a cross-shaped shadow where the old crucifix used to hang.
As Wicks’ flock dwindles to a small cadre of acolytes, wowed and cowed by his superior’s cult of personality, O’Connor’s Jud is left with seven parishioners: Wicks’ devoted right-hand woman (Glenn Close); the divorced town doctor (Jeremy Renner); a long-suffering town lawyer (Kerry Washington); a washed-up sci-fi author (Andrew Scott); a chronic pain-suffering former cellist (Cailee Spaeny); aspiring social media politician (Daryl McCormack) and a baseball-loving groundskeeper (Thomas Haden Church). Any one of them could be capable of murder. Any one of them could be a victim…
What follows might be director Rian Johnson’s most tightly plotted and satisfying mystery yet. Two Benoit Blanc outings and 22 episodes of the excellent Poker Face have seemingly done nothing to diminish his enthusiasm for his fiendish little logic puzzles, and Wake Up Dead Man delivers a delicious sequence of twists and turns with evident relish. There are fewer of Knives Out and Glass Onion’s attempts to turn the genre on its head, here – this time round Blanc’s challenge is a more classical locked door mystery, though more complex and cleverly-constructed than ever.
To that end, Craig’s Benoit Blanc – having as much fun as ever – doesn’t appear until roughly the 45-minute mark. Instead, we’re once again left with the character destined to serve as the instalment’s Watson, an endearingly scrappy Josh O’Connor, as he narrates his first nine months in the company of Wicks and his parish. It’s a character and performance which turn what could be a frustration into a blockbuster session of character-building intrigue, and though the cast around him don’t get as much of a chance to flesh out their stature, O’Connor is undoubtedly the star here.
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The tone might be a shade heavier than the franchise’s previous instalments, but the difference is hardly as pronounced as early trailers have implied. This isn’t the A Haunting In Venice to Kenneth Branagh’s Death On The Nile, and the quips and quirky turns of phrase come just as quickly as we’ve come to expect from “Foghorn Leghorn” himself. This is, gothic, not horror; as one character memorably notes, it’s a tale packed with “Scooby-Doo shit”.
If Wake Up Dead Man is a darker film, it’s because it continues the Knives Out trend of reflecting the times. Where the 2019 film poked fun at liberal elites as much as masturbating Nazis, this New York church is a den of stirred up anger, fear, and radicalisation. It’s not difficult to see Wicks’s parallels with Trump – in fact, it’s more difficult not to see them. As Brolin spits charismatic venom into his flock’s ears, we see the poisoning of American society on a small-town scale. It’s not subtle, but it’s far from clunky, either – themes of Christian love and forgiveness blossom from a perfectly-pitched story just the right shape to hold them.
But Wake Up Dead Man does struggle with a bad case of the Netflix effect, and not just its premature departure onto the streamer just two weeks after its box office debut. Johnson’s shots are beautifully constructed (shadows falling over a sunlit crucifix, Brolin stood gesticulating on a pulpit, and close-ups that let us see the fear of God in our suspects’ eyes), but the whole thing is covered in an odd and all-too familiar sheen that washes out much of the images’ inherent contrast in a way much more noticeable than in Glass Onion.
For a film which plays both thematically and often literally with light and dark, it takes what should be one of the best-looking films of the year and flattens it. There’s a greater range of colours here than in The Thursday Murder Club, but not many. While we can politely applaud Netflix for guaranteeing two Blanc mystery sequels with its $400m deal in 2021, when the future of mid-budget popular filmmaking was far from certain, it’s tempting to imagine what Johnson might conjure up now the franchise is free from its streaming-first obligations.
None of that should distract, though, from another crowd-pleasing hit from the unchallenged king of the modern mystery thriller. Rian Johnson, you’ve done it again…
Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery is currently playing at the BFI London Film Festival. It arrives in UK cinemas 26th November, and on Netflix 12th December.
