Director: Rian Johnson
Cast: Daniel Craig, Josh O’Connor, Glenn Close, Josh Brolin, Mila Kunis, Jeremy Renner, Kerry Washington, Andrew Scott, Cailee Spaeny, Daryl McCormack, Thomas Haden Church
Screenplay: Rian Johnson
140 mins. Rated PG-13 for violent content, bloody images, strong language, some crude sexual material, and smoking.

Discussing a murder mystery, especially one as well-crafted as Wake Up Dead Man, can be rather treacherous, especially regarding spoilery elements, and while I do my best to preserve the experience for others, I will be talking story and character in this piece, so if you do not wish to know any more than that, allow me to state that I firmly believe this third Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig, Casino Royale) mystery to be the best one yet, a dark and moody piece that seems on its surface to be rather by-the-numbers until something happens in the back half that had me totally perplexed by the mystery. If you wish to know nothing further, then know that this is an excellent mystery.

Things are not well in the church. The young priest Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor, Challengers) has arrived to assist Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin, Dune) and serve the congregation. The meager members of the church do not care for Jud, preferring the fire and brimstone of Wicks’s sermons. When a murder occurs during service, everyone is a suspect, and Benoit Blanc is brought in to decipher an impossible murder, committed within earshot of all suspects, who each carry more than enough motive.

Tonally, this is the darkest Knives Out film yet, with a lot of discussion around fate, the nature of truth and sin, and its suspects are all just as likely to be guilty of committing the crime. For the first half, the film is pretty traditional, although I was fascinated by Blanc’s idea of the impossible crime, one that is done in such a way that the means strain credulity to its breaking point. Then, about halfway through, when the evidence is throughly confusing and the answers are nowhere to be found, something…happens, and everything after is tainted with this diabolical and delicious horror tinge that I was mesmerized by.

The entire cast is excellent, and singling one out might lead you to start thinking about things in relation to the culprit, so I’ll mostly avoid getting too deep in the weeds on this, but know that everyone is great here. Daniel Craig continues in his quest to make Benoit Blanc his most compelling character, and I’d be more interested in seeing another Knives Out adventure than seeing Craig return to James Bond at this point. I’d also like to mention Josh O’Connor and Josh Brolin for the very specific reason that the film’s opening act is almost entirely on their shoulders. Their central relationship and conflict send a lot of the plot moving forward, so that even before Blanc appears onscreen, we have most of the setup out of the way in an extremely accessible way. O’Connor is a priest with a past, one that is trying to hide his anger and his old ways, while Brolin’s is a very spiteful and angry monsignor. Together, the two are like New and Old Testament, Mercy and Judgment, and their conflict dives into the issues of organized religion and the nature of truth in a world full of opinion.

I loved Wake Up Dead Man, and in the days since seeing it, I’ve only thought more and more on the mystery and the colorful cast of characters that Rian Johnson and Daniel Craig have cooked up. I hope we continue to see more Benoit Blanc mysteries in the coming years (especially ones with long theatrical windows and physical media releases, right?), but this is the high point to which they’ll all be compared.

4.5/5
-Kyle A. Goethe

For my review of Rian Johnson’s Knives Out, click here.