Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery

Knives Out, Rian Johnson's murder mystery saga continues with Wake Up Dead Man, once again bringing back Daniel Craig as detective Benoit Blanc, as well as a completely new cast that includes Glenn Close, Josh Brolin, Mila Kunis, Jeremy Renner, Kerry Washington, Andrew Scott, and Cailee Spaeny. However, it's the 35-year-old British Josh O'Connor, from The Crown, Challengers, and The Mastermind, who shines as the movie's true protagonist. In fact, Craig doesn't really show up until well past the first half hour of the film...

The director of Looper and Star Wars: The Last Jedi knows that viewers, when faced with a whodunnit, believe themselves to be smarter than the filmmakers, so every time he makes one of these Knives Out movies he vows to shake things around and give them something unexpected. In this case, however, he takes a more subtle approach when compared to the previous movies and focuses more on the character's psychology and less on an obscure plot.

Yes, it has everything you would expect from a Knives Out movie, like a star-studded cast with eccentric characters, a lot of humour and unexpected twists. But none of those twists feel forced like it often happens with this type of movie, the tone is more sombre and, while Craig's Benoit Blanc has some brilliant moments, his role is more reduced to focus more on Josh O'Connor's character and evolution.

The movie starts with a long prologue where every character is introduced without too much previous context. It's a lot of information and feels a little overwhelming, but it's worth the (small) effort. Tonally, Wake Up Dead Man is a sharp contrast with the previous movie, Glass Onion, which took place at a billionaire's mansion and perhaps went too far into breaking the genre conventions (by creating a fake murder mystery inside a real murder mystery), that left us a bit exhausted at the end and feeling that we were being toyed around with by the director, as if he felt like he had to show off what a genius he was (and he is).

Wake Up Dead Man, instead, throws all of that opulence away and presents a much more constrained movie, both narratively and stylistically: we switch the big glass mansion with a small neo-gothic church in a small village, run by a morally corrupted priest played by Josh Brolin, who manipulates and radicalises the small group of parishioners that still dare to attend his masses.

The small, grey church and the darker woods surrounding it are all the locations where the action take place, a dark and moody look that sometimes gets close to the visual style of the horror genre in certain claustrophobic scenes (Johnson said he took inspiration from Coppola's Dracula). In my mind, that visual style, more similar to the autumnal look of the first movie, suits these types of movies much better than the sunny pools and the luxury from Glass Onion. Less is more in every sense of the word, and the movie benefits from the enigmatic atmosphere that beautifully fits the themes that the script explores.

Wake Up Dead Man feels a more confident and mature movie, less preoccupied on delivering quick thrills from impossible plot twists and putting faith (no pun intended) in their characters. Of course, there's a big mystery that nobody but Benoit Blanc can solve, and as the title suggests, some surprising things will happen during the 144 minutes. However, the intrigue isn't solely dependant on shocking reveals, and the pace of the investigation isn't as thrilling (with the downside that Blanc feels more like a witness than an actual active investigator), and instead the thing that will keep you on your seat is understanding the motivations of the characters and their psychological evolution; why do they act and think that way.

As a result, this movie feels more introspective than the others, less exhilarating to watch but more interesting to think about while and after watching it. Rian Johnson doesn't waste the chance of reflecting about what the concept of faith means for different people, with the dialogue between Blanc and Jud (O'Connor's character, a priest) thinking about how Faith can be a source of powerful emotional support and at the same time a tool to manipulate people with good or bad intentions.

Wake Up Dead Man is another triumph in the impeccable career of Rian Johnson. It probably doesn't reach the same heights at the first film, which was clever, exciting, and thoughtful in equal ways, but succeeds in doing something different with a premise that, after three movies, does not show any signs of exhaustion. The type of movie that, even if it can leave you feeling a little cold, will grow on you the more you think about and the more you rewatch it, which you will be able to do on Netflix from December 12.