Review by Zach Dennis
If I had to have one complaint about the most recent Knives Out entry, Glass Onion, it would be its need to capture the zeitgeist at all cost.
It didn’t necessarily tarnish the product, but it did date it. Something the first movie avoided while also being able to be aware of its own surroundings. So call Wake Up Dead Man a return to form for Rian Johnson and team, a return to the macabre and autumnal. A dainty Catholic church in the woods of upstate New York and a crisis of faith.
Father Jud (Josh O’Connor) has entered into the service of Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin), a fire-brand preacher who is more interested in igniting the woke than teaching the word. He has a loyal band of followers: the faithful church servant Martha (Glenn Close); a lawyer whose family is intertwined with Wicks’ work, Vera (Kerry Washington); a depressed and drinking town doctor, Dr. Nat (Jeremy Renner); a long-forgotten writer using the alt-right to get things right named Lee (Andrew Scott); a crippled violin maestro looking to recapture her spark named Simone (Cailee Spaney); and a Charlie Kirk wannabe whose reach feels more like Bari Weiss (or he wishes) named Cy (Daryl McCormack).
Tragedy to the troupe strikes on Good Friday as their beloved preacher passes on from the pulpit, hitting pavement and dying after giving another of his patented sermons. To everyone, the obvious killer is Father Jud but to detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), there’s more to this lesson.
Craig has so finely tuned Blanc in this third effort that it allows for other cast members to shine. There was a thrill watching the first Knives Out to his Foghorn Leghorn accent that felt out of a Looney Tunes cartoon or an SNL sketch. All of that covered with the facade of James Bond.
Here, Blanc feels more real. Less sketched out. Dropping the pandering cameos and attempts at lore-building from Glass Onion and more of a focus on what makes him the world’s greatest detective. It’s helped by the star-making performance by O’Connor who trades in his eye-catching turn in Challengers for a more conventional role to attract attention from audiences.
Father Jud is the core of the movie with his crisis of faith playing out similar to the plot of the movie: how can we believe things that seem so unreal?
Johnson goes back to the Agatha Christie roots of the first movie, mentioning in a post-film discussion at TIFF that he leaned more on Edgar Allan Poe and his style of horror and mystery for this installment.
It works and his ability to weave the audience along as the mystery unravels makes experiencing a Knives Out movie more of a roller coaster than an exercise in trying to figure out the culprit before the movie leads you there. To that end, let Johnson and Craig’s obsession with Knives Out not end as there aren’t many movies coming out today in multiplexes that are this fun.