Unlike with his planned Star Wars trilogy, Rian Johnson delivered on his deal with Netflix to produce two Knives Out sequels. There was the (horrible) second installment, Glass Onion, which came out back in ’22, and now there’s Wake Up Dead Man, with the helpful after-colon title A Knives Out Mystery so that you don’t forget what you’re watching.
We’ll be real: We had zero interest in seeing another one of these after Glass Onion, but it’s undeniable that the series had a bit of a glow-up in the interim, going from a supporting cast with the likes of Edward Norton and Kate Hudson to Josh O’Connor and Kerry Washington, among others.
As always, it’s led by Vanyaland Actor of the Year 2024 and all-around GOAT Daniel Craig, so it can’t be too bad. Hell, we’ve even heard good things about it from pals who saw it at TIFF (we were too busy eating veal sandwiches and crying after Hamnet to check it out). So, it’s with this trailer that Netflix dropped earlier on Monday that we’re going to announce that — yes — we are actually kind of excited for this movie. Fool us once, Mr. Johnson…
Peep it:
In lieu of the normal short Netflix synopsis, here’s the blurb for Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery from the TIFF50 program:
“In 2019, Oscar nominated writer-director Rian Johnson and Daniel Craig revitalized the British drawing room murder mystery with the gleeful, star-laden ‘Knives Out,’ creating their own version of Agatha Christie’s unflappable detective Hercule Poirot with Craig’s brilliant Southerner, Benoit Blanc. The follow-up, ‘Glass Onion’ (TIFF ’22), focused on a tech-bro billionaire, ratcheting up the humour and evoking Herbert Ross’ cult classic ‘The Last of Sheila.’ (It also threw in the added fun of seeing obscenely rich people’s gaudiest stuff get trashed.) ‘Wake Up Dead Man’ shifts gears again with a relatively sombre look into the tensions between faith and logic.
This time, Johnson riffs on the dark, gothic elements of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ — a seemingly impossible locked-room scenario involving a corpse — while still incorporating many of the series’ signature elements. Set in a small town and focusing on its local church, ‘Wake Up Dead Man’ is packed with stars, including Josh O’Connor as a the younger cleric to Josh Brolin’s autocratic, abrasive priest, Glenn Close as his right-hand person, plus Kerry Washington, Andrew Scott, Cailee Spaeny, Jeremy Renner (whose likeness had a memorable appearance in ‘Glass Onion’), and Mila Kunis as a local cop who is as determined as Blanc to solve this seemingly insoluble case. And there’s a murder that presents itself as an impossible crime. All that and Craig delivers perhaps his best Blanc yet.
The latest entry in one of the most successful mystery series in recent film history is as strong, inventive, and entertaining as ever.“
Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery will have a limited theatrical engagement starting on November 26, before it becomes available on Netflix streaming on December 12.