Wake Up Dead Man Review – Knives Straight to the Point

After subverting expectations with two murder mysteries, how do you do it the third time? Perhaps, as Wake Up Dead Man posits, you don’t. The third Knives Out movie is the most straightforward of the three. While the first had a blast turning the whodunit on its head and the second had a murder mystery covering up a deeper dilemma, Wake Up Dead Man is more of a classic case of a crime and a corpse.

But that doesn’t mean it can’t relish in its twists and turns along the way. If you found the gleeful chaos of Glass Onion too absurd, you may appreciate the more grounded tone of Wake Up Dead Man. The film takes some steps forward, some steps back, but most of its changes are steps to the side. It tries some different moves that some may find more muted, others refreshing.

This time, the Knives Out film presents its take on the “locked room” mystery. The victim is Monsignor Wicks (Josh Brolin), a fire and brimstone preacher who enters into an enclosed room during a service and drops dead. Nobody could’ve entered or exited to kill him, though the knife in his back says otherwise. The eyes of the congregants all look to Father Jud (Josh O’Connor) as the culprit, who didn’t get along with the Monsignor. And so, Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) appears on the case.

But like the first film, Wake Up Dead Man doesn’t introduce Blanc right away. This is more Father Jud’s story. It begins with the former boxer talking about how he found religion after accidentally killing his opponent in the ring. He immediately arrives as a complex character who ends up with the biggest character arc of a Knives Out protagonist. But first, Jud gets to know the various members of the church upon arrival, including Simone (Cailee Spaeny), Lee (Andrew Scott), Nat (Jeremy Renner), Vera (Kerry Washington), Cy (Daryl McCormack), and Martha (Glenn Close), each of whom has a hurt they belief Wicks can heal.

Wake Up Dead Man does have a weakness of its own. Its ensemble cast is underutilized. If the second film indulged in the cast’s antics a bit too much, writer and director Ryan Johnson reigns this impulse too far for the third. Admittedly, the mystery is more interested in proving Father Jud’s innocence than establishing motives for each player. The plot gains some novelty from this at the expense of having colorful characters.

Less colorful is the film’s color palette, but that’s actually a benefit. Steve Yedlin’s cinematography captures the shadows of the old church, where anyone could be lurking, with moments of stark light that suggest revelation. I would personally stop shy of calling it gothic, but the film plays with weather and time of day to create gloomy moods punctuated by dramatic changes.

Wake Up Dead Man still has the satire of the first two films as it delves into themes of faith and doubt, humility vs. aggression, and forgiveness leading to redemption. The film uses religion as a vehicle for showing how humans approach solving problems in their lives. Johnson clearly uses the church as a stand in for any institution or system that promises paths to personal growth.

But to his credit, he keeps the film grounded in the specifics of religion as well. We get the perspective of two different priests, their congregation, some outsiders, and even an avowed atheist (Blanc himself) all of whom have a reckoning with belief along the way. And if this sounds heavy handed, the film still proves delightfully witty and sardonic. It navigates the paths between cynicism and sincerity well. I found the only exception a phone call that surely appears heartfelt on paper, but personally made me suspect duplicity due to its editing, which obscures the speaker. But others less desperate to figure out the crime may take it at face value, as they should.

As for the crime itself, obviously I’m not going to spoil how it gets pulled off, who commits it, or why. The culprit may seem a little more obvious than in the other films, this is a more straightforward mystery after all. The story gives shout outs to a number of “locked room” mysteries and those well-versed in them will surely figure things out even before I did. But if the mystery itself proves a little sleepy for some, Wake Up Dead Man is awake with big yet nuanced ideas in an intriguing and wry narrative.