"He got juju eyeball, he one holy roller
He got hair down to his knee
Got to be a joker, he just do what he please."
--Come Together, The Beatles (1969)
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| our detectives, victim and suspects at front: duelling priests Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin) and Jud Duplenticy (Josh O'Connor) and Great Detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) |
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| poster art resembling that for Agatha Christie mystery film of the 1970s and 1980s |
The film Knives Out came out six years ago in 2019 and has since played a major role in the classic mystery revival of the last fifteen years or so. A classic sleeper hit, it made about $165 million in the United States and $313 million worldwide, all on a $40 million budget; and it scored director and scripter Rian Johnson an Oscar nomination for his screenplay.
Knives Out has since spawned two "sequels," or rather two additional installments in the Benoit Blanc mystery series, Glass Onion (2022), apparently inspired by the Swinging Seventies mystery flick The Last of Sheila (1973), and now Wake Up Dead Man (2025), which is seeing a limited, mostly arthouse release for two weeks before its Netflix premiere on the 12th of December.
If one were to compare the three Knives Out films to what for many years was (and should have remained) the Indiana Jones trilogy--Raiders of the Lost Ark, Temple of Doom, Last Crusade--Glass Onion would be the problematic middle child in the series, the one which doesn't quite fit in. Wake Up Dead Man strikes one, like The Last Crusade did, as more of a return to the milieu of the original film, Knives Out.
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| Rian Johnson directing the film's stars, Daniel Craig and Josh O'Connor |
Knives Out is a classic dysfunctional family mystery in which children and grandchildren of a classic domineering wealthy patriarch, characteristically charmingly played, in one of his last acting performances, by a nearly nonagenarian Christopher Plummer, all become suspects when the old man is found murdered in his great mansion. It's a tale that, excepting the topical undocumented immigrant storyline, could have easily taken place in between the first and second world wars during the Golden Age of detective fiction. I have read that in writing the screenplay Johnson was inspired by Agatha Christie stories he had read as a child in the late Seventies or Eighties; and that would not surprise me at all. Any vintage mystery fan watching Knives Out could tell immediately that its maker is a "fellow traveller," as it were.
While Knives Out was set in the Boston area at a fabulous real life Victorian Gothic mansion, Dead Man takes place in upstate New York at a lovely old Victorian Gothic church (in actuality Holy Innocents Church in Greater London's Epping Forest). This time around the murder victim is the truly horrendous villain Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin), Monsignor at the Church of Perpetual Fortitude, where a young priest, Reverend Jud Duplenticy (Josh O'Connor), a former boxer turned Catholic priest, is sent after losing his temper and punching out another priest.
Though Wicks, a charismatic monster, has a cult like following among a tiny number of his parishioners, his hellfire sermons drive most people away and he makes life very difficult for young Jud. (In the film's only raunchy humor Wicks makes a point of confessing to Jud in great detail about his frequent masturbation--Rian Johnson had some masturbation humor in Knives Out too, come to think of it.)
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| Father Jud (Josh O'Connor) getting metaphorically jerked around by Monsignor Wicks (Josh Brolin) |
Wicks' cult-like following numbers all of six, plus the church caretaker/handyman, Samson Holt (Thomas Haden Church), who is doggedly loyal to the most devoted and pious old "church lady" Martha Delcroix (Glenn Close). (Just to be blunt, it seems pious Martha is shagging the younger handyman, who evidently remains handy even into his sixties.)
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| a devilish problem for Benoit Blanc |
The other faithful congregants, all of whom will serve as our additional suspects in the murder, are drunken town doctor Nat Sharp (Jeremy Renner); formerly bestselling sci-fi author Lee Ross (Andrew Scott); chain-smoking attorney Vera Draven (Kerry Washington), daughter of Wicks' late best friend and attorney; Simone Vivane, an ailing, wealthy young concert cellist, who has been promised hope of healing from Wicks (Cailee Spaeny) (she resembles a character out of PD James' 1976 detective novel The Black Tower); and Cy Draven (Daryl McCormack), Vera's viperish adopted son and a failed MAGAish aspirant to political office, now turned would-be MAGAsphere social influencer.
It's a very classic setting--an imposing smalltown church--that is reminiscent not only of Golden Age English detective writers, but to their later Silver Age follower P. D. James; and it's definitely a throwback to the first Knives Out film. The modern fillip of topical political content dealing with baneful internet social influencing--really crassly cynical political exploitation--is reminiscent of the first film too, which brought the subject of illegal immigration to the fore.
The film also stresses the crisis of faith of the main character, Father Jud. Make no mistake, Josh O'Connor is the star of this film, dominating it rather more than the character of the undocumented alien caregiver (Ana de Armas) did in Knives Out. Even Benoit Blanc takes rather the back seat to Father Jud in terms of screen time, though Daniel Craig as Blanc, just helping the local police out don't you know, is now wearing this role like a comfortable old shoe and the two make a most enjoyable investigative pair, with Jud as both lead suspect (of the local police) and Blanc's assistant "Watson," in the manner of old mysteries, where they don't go strictly by the book as far as police procedure goes.
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| murder in a cathedral probably the film's most iconic image |
I have to admit that the bulk of the suspects this go round are more pallid than those in Knives Out. The earlier film had genuinely memorable turns from Jamie Lee Curtis, Michael Shannon, Don Johnson, Toni Collette, and Chris Evans as patriarch Harlan's Thrombey's parasitic in-laws, while here none of the suspects leave as much of an impression, with the exception of the histrionic Martha (Close) (her recurrent screaming gets amusing) and her beau, the weathered, hirsute handyman Samson (Haden Church)--and perhaps the repulsive blogger (Heavens!) Cy (McCormack).
Andrew Scott gets off some good one-liners and Kerry Washington gets a few fine moments of emoting, but basically the script is not really calling on most of these people to be anything much more than puzzle pieces. In the lead, however, O'Connor is a strong, charismatic presence, as is Josh Brolin as his antagonist Wicks. Mila Kunis also appears as the local police chief and she is fine, though she is called on to do very little other than serve as a sort of foil for Blanc, as is customary in classic crime fiction.
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| It's a miracle! the monsignor murdered in a "locked" room |
To many this may sound like a criticism, but readers of the blog will probably guess that it's really not. This is very much a plot-focused film and at nearly two-and-a-half hours (!)--I had strategically to pee before Blanc's final elucidation scene--there is spacious room to unfold the complex, dare I say baroque, plot, which it nicely filled with clues as to culpritude and narrative slights of hand for the unwary.
There's also a nice locked room problem, miracle of miracles. The Monsignor is offed, apparently, in a closet where he retired in an unrighteous froth under observation of Jud in the pulpit and the seven congregants in the pews. Throughout the film Benoit Blanc keep referencing locked room maestro John Dickson Carr, whom most audiences probably will never have heard of even today, when his many books are mostly all back in print.
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| Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) detects |
Blanc waves around a copy of Carr's 1935 detective novel The Three Coffins, aka The Hollow Man, which is famed among fans for its "locked room lecture" from detective Gideon Fell (who is mentioned by him too), like it's the Holy Grail. The book was on the congregation's mystery reading list, most conveniently, along with, as I recall, Dorothy L. Sayers' Whose Body?, Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and The Murder at the Vicarage and one other title by someone else. In this film Johnson definitely owes a debt to Carr, but also to Christie as well. (I have a particular novel by her in mind and it's not necessarily one on the syllabus, actually.)
This definitely is a film for vintage mystery fans and as one I enjoyed it all immensely. I hope Rian Johnson keeps on making these movies--and considers trying a film version of Carr's The Burning Court (1937), which has a similarly dark Gothic churchly setting to Wake Up Dead Man. It's long past time Carr received his due from filmmakers and Johnson might be just the person to accomplish that.
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