Wake Up Dead Man: Smarmy Title Goes Here - A Review

I have never been much of a movie buff. I don’t tend to read reviews or go see new films often. My medium of choice is definiely video games, but every once in awhile, I end up watching a movie with my wife or something comes along that I am truly interested in. Of all movie genres, detective mysteries and heists are my favorites. I find the two to have interesting parallels and enjoy the tension between what is shown to the viewer obviously, what is shown subtly, and what is hidden altogether. It is in this aspect that I particularly love Wake Up Dead Man, the third movie in Rian Johnson’s Knives Out series.

While we all love Benoit Blanc, the heart and soul of the first Knives Out is Marta. The magic trick in Knives Out is moving the focus from the Detective to the Sidekick, a lesson that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle displayed very well in his Sherlock Holmes stories and a lesson that almost all adaptations of those characters forget. Perhaps a larger focus on Blanc is why I found Glass Onion, the second film to work so much less for me. While Helen is there, and does add an interesting wrinkle to the mystery, the focus is much more squarely on Blanc. The heart of the movie is a mystery that is wrapped up in layers of intrigue to make it seem more interesting than it is, but really it’s a stupid premise that should never have taken a famous detective to figure out in the first place, something that the movie itself calls out.

Thankfully, Johnson has come back with a heater. Blanc is here and I appreciate him greatly, but Father Jud is absolutely where the movie shines, often literally. The mystery is a fun “impossible” murder, but the true soul of the movie is absolutely in the tension between Father Jud and the rest of the cast. His faith and his decisions to put the mystery aside in favor of the things he feels he must do to try to break down the conservative fortifications surrounding the church and meet people where they are is, in some strange way, a double negative of playing the priest character against the type commonly seen in media which itself is a response to how a priest should act. It would have been so easy for this movie to fall off of the knife’s edge and come down on the side of ebing either overly cynical or not cynical enough when it comes to faith and religion, but I ended up very happy with where the movie landed, with an indictment of the conservative isolating philosophy of right-wing and facist politics backed by religion while still holding space for religious people to practice their religion productively, peasefully, and without disruption. For some, this may come off as a prescriptive way to look at religion; “This is the only correct way to do it” etc. I see it as more of a display of the consequences of trying to bring people together through hate.

Beyond the story as told directly to us, I greatly appreciated all of the small details on display here. It truly felt like a return to form as the mystery began clicking into place. I feel like, while there were twists and turns, this absolutely did not feel like a mystery with a sudden “gotcha” at any point. While I won’t go into much detail here as to avoid ruining the surprise, I will say I loved all of the various setups and payoffs as the story wound towards its conclusion. It truly felt like there were no dead ends, even with the mystery being a variant of the “locked room” style. Like with the first Knives Out, I feel like I will enjoy it even more the second time.