Movie Review: 'Wake Up Dead Man' a Rousing Tale of Faith and Felonies

Rian Johnson takes a third bite at the 'Knives Out' apple

(Photo: Josh O’Connor in Wake Up Dead Man. Credit: Netflix)

Writer-director Rian Johnson’s Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery brings sly sleuth Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) back to screens once more, but not for the first 39 minutes… except for a brief and reassuring glimpse early on that tells us yes, this is his movie and his mystery to solve. You might otherwise have doubts, given that the film begins with a narration by a flawed young priest, Father Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor), recounting how he ends up at a small and fading church ruled over with authoritarian flair by a self-serving monarch… ahem, monsignor… named Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin, looking like a superannuated Proud Boy by way of Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments). It’s not long before Duplenticy’s sincere pastoral impulses come into conflict with Wick’s performative “Warrior for Christ” ethos, and when Wicks ends up dead — in a seemingly impossible manner — the game, as they say, is afoot.

(Photo: Josh Brolin in Wake Up Dead Man. Credit: Netflix)

Though Johnson indulges himself with some scenes that unsubtly pit opposing world views against each other (religion as faith vs. religion as a means of control; politics as service vs. politics as self-enriching manipulation of those willing to believe in a strongman), he also sets about spinning the kind of hall-of-mirrors narrative that made the first two Knives Out movies so much fun. Central to this is a large cast of characters who, while not terribly dimensional, are vivid. Glenn Close plays Wicks’ longtime assistant, Martha, and Thomas Haden Church plays Martha’s groundskeeper husband, Samson, a reformed alcoholic; Kerry Washington plays Vera, the church’s lawyer, who has inherited the role from her father much as Monsignor Wicks inherited his clerical throne from his own father; Daryl McCormack plays Vera’s adopted son, Cy, a failed Republican politician and right-wing influencer who is shamelessly playing the GOP demonization game for his own advancement; Andrew Scott plays Lee, a sci-fi writer who has swapped his scribblings about superior intelligence from the sky in the form of aliens for an unquestioning belief in another form of celestial supremacy; Jeremy Renner plays Nat, a physician whose failed marriage Wicks leverages into vitriolic misogyny; and Mila Kunis swoops in when needed as Geraldine, the hard-nosed police chief of the town whose interest in divine mysteries is nil, but who is dead set on solving the Monsignor’s murder. (It’s she who bring Benoit in on the case.)

(Photo: The cast of Wake Up Dead Man. Credit: Netflix)

The slaying takes place during a Good Friday mass. That’s not the only Biblical parallel: There’s a tomb, a “Road to Damascus” moment, and an assortment of betrayals. The false leads and incomplete narratives multiple like loaves and fishes as the film unwinds, and there are more revelations than books in a typical (pre-DeSantis-style censorship) library. Things get so busily labyrinthine that there are moments when you might question whether confession really is good for the soul, but by the time the film reaches its apocalyptic climax you have to marvel at both Johnson’s cleverness and his audacity. As with all such Agatha Christie-esque mysteries, everyone is a suspect (and at one time or another almost everybody is all but proved to be the killer), but that’s only one aspect of how Johnson has set, and over-set, this table. You’ll find endlessly nested cultural critiques bursting forth at every juncture.

(Photo: Mila Kunis, Daniel Craig, and Josh O’Connor in Wake Up Dead Man. Credit: Netflix)

Still, in a certain four-color and darkly comic way, Wake Up Dead Man is a brilliant piece of work. Satirical, winking, and fun, this whodunit subtly asks the same question as every great, enduring theologian: Who dunn’t it? Who doesn’t have hate in his (or her) heart? Who wouldn’t commit the most atrocious sins as long as they felt they had permission, or at least a good rationale? We’re invited to ask ourselves where we fall on a spectrum of absolute, rather than convenient, morality. Benoit Blanc, meantime, chuckles, sticks to facts and reason, and plays it close to his queer-coded vest, this time even more than usual.

“Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery” is streaming now on Netflix.