Miraculously, Wake Up Dead Man is another vital Benoit Blanc whodunit
Rian Johnson takes the latest Knives Out mystery to church, looking for answers in the midst of a charged and charming congregation.
Photo: Netflix
Each of writer-director Rian Johnson’s Knives Out whodunits, like the paperbacks they draw from and sometimes literally cite, is defined by the setting of its murder. Where the original squeezed class critique from its drawing room of squabbling one-percenters and Glass Onion over-indulged on a Mediterranean takedown of its billionaire tech bro’s inner circle, Wake Up Dead Man welcomes Johnson’s blend of snark and sincerity into a church that houses both crime and suspects. More quaintly focused than the exuberant previous film, though with no shortage of eccentric characters or longwinded side stories, Wake Up Dead Man agreeably seeks answers both existential and earthly.
That doesn’t mean that there’s an excess of self-importance weighing down either the movie (which is a bit less satirically heavy-handed than the previous films) or Daniel Craig’s excessive detective Benoit Blanc. The Tennessee Williams fop that Cajun Bobby Hill would be jealous of maintains his spry yet principled charm with ease; perhaps more easily than ever, considering he isn’t the main draw this time around. That honor belongs to the strongest of the franchise’s sidekicks: Reverend Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor). O’Connor plays his ex-boxer holy man with an affable small-town earnestness, recounting his arrival in the upstate New York town of Chimney Rock—and the subsequent drama his placement at Our Lady Of Perpetual Fortitude brings—with both feet on the ground.
Even if he’s been shipped off to Nowheresville because he socked a fellow man of the cloth, Duplenticy provides necessary stability to the story. The rural churchgoing community he enters is a perfectly warm and catty setting for a mystery, with plenty of built-in thematic heft. O’Connor’s genuine performance shoulders the film’s interest in religion—what people seek from it, what it can provide, the white lies it tells to get to something true—while deftly avoiding being, well, preachy. These are nuanced ideas, ideas that could easily backfire as Wake Up Dead Man connects the things that religion asks you to take on faith with the agreed-upon narratives of an insular community. It takes all of O’Connor’s soft-spoken, goofy-grinned prowess to keep these ideas from being fully overwhelmed by the congregation he’s swept up into, and the priest who commands them from his fire-and-brimstone pulpit (Josh Brolin’s hilariously imposing, quite literally masturbatory Monsignor Jefferson Wicks).
Wicks looks like Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments and sermonizes from a platform that wouldn’t be out of place in Moby Dick‘s outrageous church. When Blanc mutters “Scooby Dooby Doo” to himself—as beautifully pronounced as “cellar door”—it’s not just because the mystery Wake Up Dead Man stumbles into has an air of the performatively supernatural. It’s also because everyone Blanc and his devout acquaintance run into has the bearing of a Hanna-Barbera baddie. Johnson continues to excel at introducing a crowd of archetypical little nuisances, defined in part by their possible motive for the crime all but pinned on the hapless Duplenticy: The murder of Monsignor Wicks.
