Review: “Wake Up Dead Man”

It would be so easy to make every entry in the Knives Out series a cookie cutter whodunit, coasting by on the charms of lead Daniel Craig and the increasingly starry revolving door of famous faces who populate the rest of the cast. It’s a credit to series creator, writer and director Rian Johnson, however, that each movie reinvents itself in both content and form. That’s especially true of the third Knives Out film, Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, which begins with a lengthy preamble that not only takes its time building to the actual mystery, but waits a significant amount of time to introduce Craig’s private detective Benoit Blanc into the proceedings. Typically, in both Knives Out and its sequel, Glass Onion, Blanc isn’t the lead so much as whatever person he is helping is. That’s even more true in Wake Up Dead Man, in which Josh O’Connor does most of the heavy lifting.

O’Connor plays Reverend Jud Duplenticy, a Catholic priest who was formerly a boxer. He’s haunted by having killed an opponent in the ring, but he still has some of that fight in him; when we first meet him, he’s punching a deacon who got on his last nerve. The bishop (Jeffrey Wright in a small but memorable role) isn’t angry with Duplenticy, per se, but he does have to take some sort of action, so he assigns him to Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude in upstate New York, led by Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin). The domineering Wicks plays mind games with Duplenticy, and has an unsettling hold over his congregation that feels out of line with Duplenticy’s idea of the church’s role in guiding people through their faith. Naturally, down the line, a murder occurs on the church grounds, and the eclectic batch of folks who comprise his regular followers are immediate suspects: Martha (Glenn Close), Wicks’ closest assistant, and her handy groundskeeper husband Samson (Thomas Hayden Church); Nat (Jeremy Renner), the town doctor who succumbed to alcoholism after his wife and kids left him; Simone (Cailee Spaeny), a former concert pianist searching for a cure to the pain that has left her wheelchair-bound; Lee (Andrew Scott), a formerly best-selling sci-fi author; Vera (Kerry Washington), a lawyer, and her adoptive son Cy (Daryl McCormack), an aspiring politician who spends most of his time making inflammatory YouTube videos. Mila Kunis, meanwhile, plays the hard-nosed  local police chief Geraldine, looking for any chance to convict the suspicious Duplenticy and butting up against Blanc’s winding suppositions.

There’s not a bad apple in the ensemble, although Johnson’s script this go-around trades in biting wit and obvious critiques of upward mobility for something more introspective and philosophical, even if its catering to broad liberalism and lack of a stringent critique of organized religion and the two-faced-ness of its followers somewhat flattens it. Befitting of its content, there’s less comedy throughout Wake Up Dead Man compared to its predecessors, and less stand-outs in the cast; even Craig’s Blanc appears a little lost at times, overshadowed by O’Connor— who’s both wonderfully funny and earnest and achingly tortured— and Close, who gets her meatiest role in a minute as a woman whose devotion blinded her to reality. All of the characters, really, are wrestling with some sort of crisis of faith, even Blanc, who demurs from the grand, climatic unpacking of the case expected from a detective of his renown in favor of allowing the culprits to make their own peace with what they’ve done, and ask for forgiveness.

Johnson reunites with a lot of his regular crew here, including Nathan Johnson for score and Steve Yedlin for cinematography. The latter’s work in Wake Up Dead Man is particularly lush, from the verdant woods surrounding the church grounds— a recurring spot where characters cross paths under mysterious circumstances throughout the film— to the nooks and crannies of the church’s austere sanctuary. Each new turn of the story means the narrative is constantly treading back over itself, looking at the incident from new angles and providing fresh information that renders the repetitiveness of each flashback irrelevant. Johnson’s work continues to be indebted to some obvious influences, including Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr’s 1935 locked room mystery novel The Hollow Man, which is explicitly referenced throughout Wake Up Dead Man, but his writing is just clever enough (in an earnest way, not an irritating or snide one) to pull off that tricky balance of working as both homage and send-up, presenting the rules of the game as we traditionally know them before shaking them up and flipping them all around. It’s just convoluted enough to occasionally lose some steam, but not before some new twist pulls the audience back in.

But what’s really lovely about the Knives Out series is how, regardless of the who what when where of the mystery, the narrative always circles back around to the inherent kindness of people. Previously, it’s been Blanc guiding us in that direction; here’s, it’s Duplenticy, who shares a scene with Bridget Everett (playing a chatty construction company employee) that provides the film with a much-needed jolt of sincerity, while serving as an important stepping stone in Duplenticy’s journey back to connecting with what made him join the church in the first place. It’s a gut-punch of a scene that’s one of the best of the year, and an indication of why these films are so enduring beyond the initial thrill of solving a puzzle.

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery is now playing in theaters, and will be available to watch on Netflix on December 12. Runtime: 144 minutes. Rated PG-13.