Rian Johnson’s detective stories make no bones about loving detective stories. In the writer-director’s Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, that love is evident when Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) explains the intricacies of the locked-room mystery using a copy of John Dickson Carr’s 1935 novel The Hollow Man, and when the private investigator’s sleuthing turns up an Oprah-approved reading list of other classic detective tales.
This third entry in Johnson’s Knives Out series clearly knows the detective fiction genre inside and out, cleverly deploying its tropes even as it mocks them so that we’re never quite sure which details we should be keeping our eyes on. The genre is built on that kind of misdirection, and Wake Up Dead Man uses it to explore, in timely fashion, an idea that’s haunted the genre since its inception: the tension between what we see and what we believe.
Where Glass Onion made everything about Knives Out bigger, brighter, and more glamorous, Wake Up Dead Man brings Blanc to a quieter, dingier, literally more parochial place: a small church in upstate New York led by the rancorous Monseigneur Wick (Josh Brolin) and his ever-faithful assistant, Martha (Glenn Close). As for what stays the same, Wake Up Dead Man waits a good half hour before throwing Blanc into the mix of things, and by then you’ll no doubt have become endeared to one Rev. Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor).
Adding another to his recent run of winning lead performances, O’Connor combines the dorky charms of an overgrown boy with the radiant decency of a true man of God. His Jud is an earnest young priest who’s been sent out to calm Wick’s fierier tendencies, only to find himself marked as an enemy of the Monseigneur and an outcast from the congregation. So, when someone turns up dead, the finger is quickly pointed in Jud’s direction. Enter Benoit Blanc.
Like Knives Out and Glass Onion before it, Wake Up Dead Man boasts an excellent ensemble, with the likes of Cailee Spaeny, Jeremy Renner, and Kerry Washington turning up as members of Wick’s loyal flock, and each of them easily tunes into the series’s very particular comic energy. But the two men at its center are the standouts. Blanc is a character that Craig seems to wear as comfortably as those impeccably tailored suits, to the point that the biggest laughs often come not from the punchlines that he’s given—though many of these are also hilarious—but from the little frowns, grimaces, and half-smiles that he punctuates them with.
A decent and deep-thinking man cut from a very different cloth, Jud makes the perfect partner for Blanc, and O’Connor shows a similar ability to modulate the tone of his performance in time with the film. One minute the two of them are in full cartoon mode, Craig doing his Foghorn Leghorn routine while O’Connor flails around amiably like the chef from Ratatouille, and the next they’ve reined it in, as if to allow the film a moment of quiet sincerity—like when Jud breaks off from the murder investigation so that he can comfort a stranger over the phone.
That ability to switch modes is one of the keys to Wake Up Dead Man’s success as it pokes fun at the conventions of detective stories but never becomes so self-aware that you stop taking it seriously. The film has an expectedly satirical bent, with right-wing rabble rousers this time caught in Johnson’s crosshairs. Those include Wick, who enjoys bellowing at single mothers and queer people from his literal bully pulpit; Cy (Daryl McCormack), an aspiring influencer who turns the sermons into YouTube clickbait; and Lee (Andrew Scott), a once-famous author who’s tumbled down an alt-right rabbit hole and come out sprawled at Wick’s feet.
As with the “eat the rich” messaging of the first two films the series, the satire here is fun but fairly black and white, a case of preaching largely to their choir with an assortment of potential villains who are painted in intentionally one-dimensional terms. But Wake Up Dead Man also finds space for a more nuanced and thoughtful dialectic in the gap between its two heroes.
Blanc and Jud are set up as opposites but not enemies. They do some good-natured sparring, bartering the power of ratiocination against the value of good storytelling, but soon this debate pulls the whole movie, and the whole mystery genre, inside out by asking what it really means to “solve” a crime. Is it enough simply to see the wicked punished and our powers of deduction praised? Or is there a greater sort of justice to strive for, one involving less pride and more grace? Like all the best detective tales, Wake Up Dead Man doesn’t just dazzle us with a clever answer at the end. It also leaves us with a mystery to ponder for ourselves.
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It’s a shame that those of us who can’t afford a Netflix subscription won’t see this. A cinema release would have helped.