★★★½
Rian Johnson’s third Benoit Blanc mystery turns inward, swapping farce for faith and giving the franchise its most sombre outing yet.
Set in a devout upstate New York community, Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery opens not with Benoit Blanc but with Reverend Jud Duplenticy, played with haunted precision by Josh O’Connor. His rabble-rousing Monsignor, Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin), collapses dead during an Easter service and the crime looks impossible: the church was full, yet no one saw a thing. When Blanc finally appears, the best part of an hour in, he enters a case that is as much about faith and guilt as it is about logic and proof.
Johnson has said this is his most personal Knives Out yet, shaped by his own experience of growing up Protestant before turning away from religion, and that sensitivity shows. The film treats faith with sincerity and curiosity rather than irony. It is also his most deliberately serious entry. The farcical hijinks of Glass Onion gives way to something quieter and more searching: a mystery filtered through candlelight and incense. The result feels gothic and Poe-tinged, a film of basements and confessionals that puts the crypt in cryptic.
O’Connor carries much of the weight and gives the film its heart. His priest is a man whose conviction is crumbling, surrounded by suspicion and hypocrisy. He is the best thing here, giving what could have been a stock role a fierce, human uncertainty. Craig, when he finally turns up, plays Blanc with restraint and less of the buffoonish flair that usually brightens the series. Johnson has said every great detective carries a touch of theatricality; here he strips it away. Blanc becomes a listener rather than a performer, and that quieter approach suits the story’s tone, even if it risks feeling muted after the exuberance of the earlier films.
The supporting cast, including Glenn Close, Kerry Washington, Mila Kunis, and Daryl McCormack, does solid work, though the script keeps them in tight orbit around the puzzle. Only Jeffrey Wright, in a brief appearance, brings real belly laughs. The screenplay nods to the classics, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, The Hollow Man, and The Judas Window, and even folds them into the plot through a sly Oprah book-club gag. It is Johnson tipping his hat to the form while building something moodier on top of it.
At two hours and twenty minutes, the film can drag, especially through its scene-setting first act when Blanc is still offstage, but it lands well. The heartfelt finale finds real feeling in its resolution. The pleasure is not in an intricate reveal – I figured the culprit if not the mechanism fairly early on – so much as in the emotional weight that follows it.
I liked Wake Up Dead Man, although it is probably my least favourite of the trilogy so far. It is slower, less funny, and less purely entertaining than the others, but it is also more thoughtful, willing to take faith and doubt seriously, and more interested in what the mystery says about belief itself. That honesty stays with you after the credits roll.
Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery opens the London Film Festival tonight, before beginning a two-week cinema run on 26 November and streaming worldwide on Netflix from 12 December.
Whitlock&Pope 