Wake Up Dead Man review: The ‘funniest and most playful’ Knives Out mystery yet

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.

Glenn Close is a standout as Martha, who keeps the accounts and the church in order and has been devoted to the Wicks family all her life. Martha makes a very funny entrance, with some serious Mrs Danvers energy, popping up out of nowhere like the devious housekeeper in Hitchcock’s Rebecca and Frau Blucher, the send-up of Mrs Danvers in Young Frankenstein.

O’Connor gives Jud some wonderfully sharp but understated comic takes as he reacts to these oddball surroundings and to the even odder Wicks. And when things get serious he projects Father Jud’s sincerity. Or is he sincere? The name Duplenticy is so close to duplicity that it invites scepticism, or maybe it’s just the most blatant of many red herrings. No one is what they seem, and part of the mystery is wondering who is wearing the falsest mask.

Among them, Daryl McCormack plays Cy, a failed politician who spends his time filming the churchgoers and putting the videos on YouTube as part of his comeback. “This is my last-chance ticket out of Substack hell,” he says, anchoring the film in the present day. Thomas Haden Church plays the parish groundskeeper, Jeremy Renner, a forlorn doctor, and Andrew Scott plays a sci-fi author. Kerry Washington has a surprisingly small role as a lawyer and Cailee Spaeny plays a musician hoping that Wicks can help her find a miracle cure for the nerve disorder that derailed her career. The choice of a religious setting is inspired. It opens up the possibility of something supernatural happening, a challenge to Blanc, who prides himself on his rationality. And it offers many opportunities for us to hear confessions, some honest and some not.

At over two hours, the film goes on a bit too long as confessions start piling up, but better to have too much of this romp than too little. And it doesn’t even cover everything it could have. What about Hugh Grant’s character, glimpsed as Blanc’s life partner at the end of The Glass Onion, the previous Knives Out film? Sadly, he isn’t mentioned at all. But Wake Up Dead Man functions perfectly well even when Blanc himself is nowhere around, which is a testament to Josh O’Connor and to the way Rian Johnson keeps this buoyant franchise alive.