KWIF: Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. With the holiday season upon us, more of my energy is going into holiday movie watching for the Advent Calendar, rather than cinema. But also, having just restored AppleTV, it's been catch-up time, dominating the other side of my viewing schedule. But some movies just won't wait, and when there's a new Benoit Blanc/Rian Johnson/Knives Out joint, it's go time.

2025, d. Rian Johnson - Netflix

It's almost 45 minutes into Wake Up Dead Man that the central detective of this series of murder mysteries rears his head. Up until then we are following Father Jud Duplenticy (Josh O'Connor, The Crown) as, after punching out a fellow priest, he is assigned as the assistant pastor at a small-town parish led by the tough and vociferous Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin, Jonah Hex). Wicks takes delight in fucking with Jud, particularly in his confessions, but Wicks' strong personality and tight grip over his ever shrinking group of disciples which he steers with rage, fear and right wing propaganda lead the two men to conflict. And then Wicks ends up dead --murdered-- in a manner that seems, at its face, impossible. Father Jud is the only plausible suspect in this impossible crime, and the disciples (and town beyond) point fingers in blame. What can a priest do but pray for God's to send help.

Thus enters Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig, Cowboys & Aliens), the notorious erudite cajun detective. The meeting is a scintillating piece of filmmaking. Father Jud asks Blanc if he is a believer, and Blanc, a man of logic, is most definitely not a believer in things he cannot see or logic. The scene, within the gorgeous church architecture that is one of the main sets of the film, starts lit incredibly warmly, as if bathed in lush summer sunshine, with Blanc's entrance the seemingly divine intervention Father Jud asked for. But as Jud gives Blanc space to elaborate upon his beliefs, which entail an inability to look at the Church or religion and not see the vast and continued history of darkness that underlies it, the temperature of the room cools greatly, as if the sun not just clouded over, but blew a fuse. Father Jud, however youthful and out of his depth he has seemed over the preceding 45 minutes, doesn't just hear what Blanc says, he understands it, and his rebuttal, which isn't even so much a rebuttal so much as the other side of the coin, returns the warmth to the room, returns the sunshine to the sky. Blanc hasn't so much lost an argument, but found his chess game put in check. It's one of the most exhilarating scenes I've seen in movies this year, and it's hard not to feel those temperature changes as you watch it.

Asking an audience to spend 45 minutes without the feature character of the particular film series may seem like a big ask, but the set-up here is wholly engrossing. What we learn eventually is that those 45 minutes, as narrated by Father Jud, are him writing down the events as he recalls them at Blanc's request. O'Connor, who star was pumped full of light in last year's Challengers, should now hang high and bright going forward. It's an immensely charismatic performance with an extremely likeable and brilliantly written character. Father Jud is thrown into a sea of sharks at his new parish, and the 45 minutes is well spent diving into the personalities at play, starting with Wicks, the church's assistant Martha (Glenn Close, Guardians of the Galaxy), her beloved groundskeeper Gus (Thomas Hayden Church, Spider-Man 3), the alcoholic town doctor and recent divorcee Dr. Nat Sharp (Jeremy Renner, Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters), the cellist with debilitating nerve pain Simone Vivane (Cailee Spaeny, Pacific Rim Uprising), the successful sci-fi author Lee Ross who has taken the red pill (Andrew Scott, Sherlock), local lawyer Vera Draven (Kerry Washington, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer) and Cy (Daryl McCormack, Twisters), her half brother who she was forced by her father to adopt, who fell into the Black Republican cesspool and refuses to exit.

Who these people are, and the snippets of their past that we're introduced to, all have relevance to the proceedings of the film. For a 145-minute film, so little of it is wasted. I struggle to think of extraneous details. What it does, as a detective story, is invest the audience so much more into the characters and their dynamics, that it's so much more the interesting part of the story than the whodunnit. And it's not just a whodunnit, but also a howdunnit, and a whydunnit. Having so many questions to answer alleviates the audience from guessing games, the usual meta part of watching a murder mystery. I think only once in the entire run time of the film did I make a guess as to who the murderer was, and even that wasn't so much a guess as it was a "something's fishy about this person's story".

Clearly director Johnson, having also created the neo-Columbo TV series Poker Face and the neo-noir Brick which launched his career, loves detective stories, and even within this film gives the audience a reading list of novels about impossible murders, one of which serves as this film's murderer's guidepost. Johnson's deep investment in detective stories pays off in a film that understands the genre enough to not only play to all its strengths but also play with how to tell such stories and to layer different sub-sub-types of the genre on top of one another. He leans into cliches as much as he subverts them and uses them all to his storytelling purposes. And he uses the format as a foundation upon which to drop the most scathing satire of the America that Bannon and Trump have built, and some remedies to it, starting with not letting the bastards get you down, and connecting, genuinely, with one's community.

As brilliant as Blanc's first meeting with Father Jud is, it's not the film's best moment. That comes when Father Jud makes a phone call as part of his investigation with Jud, expressing to the woman on the other end of the phone the urgency in which he needs the information. She's a bit of a talker and Jud tries to hurry the conversation along, and apply pressure when she puts up blockers to his information request. Father Jud's impatience, and Blanc's beside him, are palpable, but the scene is full of humour, until the woman ask Father Jud, after a long, patience-thinning pause, if he would pray for her, and he with barely a moments hesitation, snaps into Priest mode and everything, quite literally changes.  I have not seen Bridget Everett's much lauded HBO series Somebody, Somewhere, but from what I've heard of the show, it's evident why Johnson cast her in this part and maybe even tailored the part to her. The tonal balance between comedic performance and then the turn to something deeply emotional seems to be Everett's baileywick, and it's a scene in this film that surprisingly brought me to tears. 

This is a film that features religion at its centre, and there are, in both dialogue and structure, arguments in favour and against religion. But it's not a film taking sides. It's a film that ultimately wants hope, and community and charity and forgiveness to win out. It's a film that wants people to come together rather than be pulled apart, even if they don't see eye to eye on everything. It's a film that knows greed is probably the most active deadly sin, perhaps fuelling or even manufacturing the other deadly sins beneath it.

A genre pic like this, especially one that is almost two and half hours long, could feel bloated with self-importance, and bogged down in messaging or thumping, and instead it's a highly energetic, tremendously entertaining, propulsive film full of terrific moments, a neck-breaking amount of organic twists, and fantastic performances.  It's a damn great time.

[Note: I still think it's weird whenever a series takes the name of its first film, and yet the series name has nothing to do with the rest of the films. Like, this should be subtitled "A Benoit Blanc Mystery"... just as there were six films with "The Thin Man" in the title, when the titular Thin Man was just a suspect in the first film. Bah. Stupid.]

[Poster talk, briefly... I don't find any of the posters for this film particularly compelling, particularly the breadth of character-based posters. I wish there were iconography posters, selling on particular elements of the story... the wolf's head, the mausoleum, the "l'Eveil Appel", artfully done of course].