Props to Rian Johnson for turning lemons into lemonade: the man hears that Glass Onion was too preachy, then sets the next feature in the Knives Out series in a parish. It shouldn’t be surprising that he’s wound up here — his movies are puzzle boxes that JJ Abrams wishes he was talented enough to pen — but, as fun as these movies can be, it is somewhat frustrating to find us contractually back here again, when there once seemed to be more on the horizon; roster depth and some dingers tiding one over until the inevitable Wild Card round loss. The team could do better, but at least they’re not where they were last season. If Knives Out was a smart iteration on the Christie formula and Glass Onion the worst kind of Last of Sheila remake, the latest installment, Wake Up Dead Man, represents all the possibilities and perils that the words “A Rian Johnson Whodunnit” imply.
On the one hand, you have a well-crafted murder mystery performed by a dynamic, smartly-assembled cast, led by an actor who has created one of the best franchise-leading characters in recent memory. This time, our subject is the reverend Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor), a priest who’d resemble Bing Crosby’s crooning Christ-follower in Going My Way if he’d chosen boxing over ballads. He’s been assigned by a foul-mouthed bishop (Jeffery Wright) to assist a struggling parish led by Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin). The problem isn’t increasing secularism, a lack of interest, or that the issues of the modern-day Catholic Church have come home to roost — the problem is Wicks himself, who has crafted a targeted fire-and-brimstone approach to the pulpit intentionally meant to alienate newcomers.
He’s got money and tragedy in his past — he’s following in his grandfather’s footsteps as a priest, blasting his mother as a “harlot whore,” who placed herself under grandad’s iron fist to do what she wanted after she acquired her inheritance. They both died — the daughter penniless outside of her father’s sealed mausoleum, Grandad smugly satisfied his daughter would never, ever get her inheritance. You get enough trauma like that, and of course, you’re going to torture the new priest at your parish by listing off during confession how many times you’ve jerked off in the last week without sparing a single detail.
The remaining congregants are, of course, comprised of the occasionally sympathetic person and Johnson’s Twitter nemeses represented as boorish archetypes. It’s not nearly as bad as it was in Glass Onion, but having two right-wing grifters — Andrew Scott’s failing sci-fi writer, now a Substacker with such intense paranoia he’s turned his house into a fortress, and Daryl McCormick’s failed politician with an omnipresent smartphone camera rig and a murky family history — is a bit much. On the sympathetic side, there’s Jeremy Renner as the town doctor, dealing with alcoholism after his wife left him; Kerry Washington as the Wicks’ family’s lawyer (who “adopted” McCormick later in life); Cailee Spaney as a cellist with a degenerative disease who bought Wicks’ snake oil that he could heal her; and Thomas Haden Church as the groundskeeper, a charming and sober fellow who’s gruffness conceals his devotion.
Finally, there’s Glenn Close, who plays Wicks’ girl Friday, responsible for much of the church’s upkeep and management, a true believer in her own right with designs of her own. When Wicks dies in front of his congregation during a Good Friday service in truly mysterious circumstances, all eyes land on Jud, whose disagreements with Wicks’ ideology and method are close to boiling over. It’s damn near close to the perfect murder, and you better bet the Sheriff (Mila Kunis) ain’t gonna figure it out on her own. He’s the fall guy.
Or, at least he’s supposed to be, until the southern-fried bon vivant Benoit Blanc (Vanyaland 2025 Performer of the Year Daniel Craig) shows up on Saturday. Craig remains the best personality in on-screen detective fiction since Peter Ustinov’s Poirot, and the fun that he has working with Johnson is infectious enough to gloss over a great deal of the series’ problems. The formula for the leads — in which Craig is paired with an emerging acting talent like Ana de Armas or Janelle Monae — has never been well-mixed, and O’Connor is a brilliant straight man to Craig’s crime-solving Foghorn Leghorn. Blanc is everything Jud isn’t, with his book-learning, fancy dress, appreciation for show tunes, strong stomach, and resistance to all things relating to religion, but the two form a strange bond, mostly because Jud knows he’s his only way out of prison and because Blanc knows in his heart that the priest didn’t do it. He’s guilty, suffering from a heavy conscience, but not responsible.
Both grow and evolve as characters, and find themselves challenged by the events of the story, though you’ll have to watch to find out why. I feel comfortable in saying that this is the best-assembled ensemble in one of these movies yet, a nice pick-up from Glass Onion’s fuck-up in the casting department, and the entire feature goes down easy, smoothed by Craig’s sheer charisma and Johnson’s skilled sleight-of-hand and storytelling.
To alter a prior thesis, the main problem with the Knives Out movies isn’t their inherent timeliness (though Johnson’s need to comment on current events ensures that the shelf life of these features will be much shorter than the ones he’s paying homage to), it’s that they’re suffused with a cloying cleverness. It’s not enough to merely revive the “locked-room mystery” or acknowledge the influence of John Dickson Carr’s The Hollow Man on the text— Close has to select it as a choice for the church book club among many of its predecessors and descendants, and Craig has to walk us through Carr’s outline of the “perfect crime” so that the non-mystery heads in the audience can appreciate the depth of Johnson’s knowledge.
These aren’t so much conversations with the genre as much as they resemble lectures, with the extremely online politics only amplifying that tone. It’s not arrogance or pretension*, it’s an enthusiasm that anyone with an ADHD friend knows all too well; their latest hyperfocus ensuring that your average car ride conversation will transform into a deluge of facts. The issues come in how the passenger hears these stream-of-consciousness rambles coming from the driver’s seat.** Sometimes, they’re interesting and engaging; other times, one wants to leap out of the car and take their chances on walking from Albuquerque to Walla Walla.
However, compared to Glass Onion, Wake Up Dead Man feels like a return to form, even if I don’t know if Johnson will ever be able to recapture what made the first film feel special beyond putting together a great ensemble (something Branagh has often done with his Christie adaptations) and offering Craig a chance to steal every single scene (something Branagh can’t do with Poirot). It’s clear enough that he wants to – returning to the gothic landscapes of the Northeast, getting rid of the goddamned puzzles, adding a fair bit of bitchy family history – and it’s hard to blame him.
Once the story breaks free of the vice-like grip the metatext has on its throat, and barring a few lily-gilding twists, there’s a really compelling mystery here, buffeted by strong writing, a keen wit, and an appealingly dark sensibility compared to its predecessor. All of these elements are made even better in a theater, where you can immerse yourself in the story and experience the wonder of a collective laugh. I can’t really imagine how Wake Up Dead Man will play at home, but I doubt it’s more fun. If we can’t have one of these without the politics or the series’ referential nature, I hope we’ll get the next installments in movie theaters for longer than a two-week run at Cinemark.
* One doesn’t direct a Star War in this era without having proven their skill and talent as a filmmaker.
** I am often the driver in this metaphor, so I don’t mean it as a dig at the neurodivergent.