Daniel Craig returns as Benoit Blanc and Josh O’Connor nearly steals the show in the “darkest” but also “most playful” instalment of the Knives Out franchise so far.
Can anyone steal a Knives Out film from the great detective Benoit Blanc? As it turns out, yes, almost. The biggest revelation of Wake Up Dead Man, the third in Rian Johnson’s series of deliciously entertaining mysteries, is that Josh O’Connor, so great at drama, is also an excellent comic. He plays Father Jud Duplenticy, a former boxer turned priest, who as punishment for a violent outburst is sent from upstate New York to a tiny parish in the village of Chimney Rock. It’s a setting that looks as if it has been transported from a screen adaptation of an Agatha Christie novel, with a small neo-Gothic church and adjacent graveyard. It’s exactly the kind of place where too many murders take place. But instead of meeting some kindly vicar, Jud goes to work for Monsignor Jefferson Wicks, played by Josh Brolin as a wild-haired, fiery cynic.
With its Gothic atmosphere and deeper themes, Wake Up Dead Man has a darker tone than the previous Knives Out films. Yet it is also the funniest and most playful so far. Along with the usual murder(s) and large glittery cast, it has religion, and a touch of meta in its literary allusions and film references. Johnson has acknowledged wanting to go back to the roots of mystery stories with this instalment, citing Edgar Allan Poe, so it’s good to keep in mind Poe’s themes of men haunted by guilt and of creepy burials. But with more assurance than ever, he walks a perfectly balanced line as he borrows old tropes and adapts them. There is plenty of irreverent dialogue here, and rude graffiti on a mausoleum.
It’s not quite fair to say that O’Connor steals the film from Daniel Craig’s Blanc. Craig is a scene-stealer himself. Blanc turns up to solve a murder in Chimney Rock with his southern accent and confident swagger, looking more dapper than ever. But it seems that with each Knives Out film he has fewer scenes, and at times he is like an orchestra conductor weaving us through the various characters and possibilities in the ever-twisting plot. Blanc even enlists Jud’s help in solving the murder. There’s no question that Father Jud is the film’s throughline, and O’Connor swerves gracefully from comic to serious.
Johnson begins by playing with point of view. We get Jud’s account, requested by Blanc, of the events leading to what Jud calls the Good Friday murder. Using a device he acknowledges is borrowed from mystery novels, he introduces Blanc and us to the congregants, most of them with a cultish devotion to Wicks.
