Benoit Blanc goes to church: Mysteries and faith in Wake Up Dead Man

Rian Johnson’s ‘Knives Out’ series blends classic detective conventions and sociopolitical satire—but his exploration of wholesome and toxic forms of religion is his most ambitious yet.

SDG Original source: U.S. Catholic

About two-thirds of the way through Wake Up Dead Man—the exhilarating third installment in Rian Johnson’s Knives Out series starring Daniel Craig as gentleman sleuth Benoit Blanc—a young priest makes a phone call to a local family-owned business. This business may have a critical piece of information bearing on the murder that Blanc is trying to solve, and on the priest’s own uncertain future. The chatty woman who answers the phone is familiar with the church and the murder, making it challenging for the agitated priest to get a word in edgewise; and, with Blanc impatiently gesticulating at the priest to get the information that is their priority, the halting exchange initially plays as small-town comedy.

Then the phone call takes an unexpected turn, and the woman on the other end (Bridget Everett) is no longer merely a humorous impediment to a murder investigation, but a human being with her own cares and woes. As the conversation continues, Rev. Jud Duplenticy (an ingenuous John O’Connor) arrives at a moment of clarity regarding what his real priorities are. The Knives Out movies have always existed in a moral universe larger than the mystery du jour, but that universe has never been larger than in Wake Up Dead Man.

Wake Up Dead Man is about an impossible murder, among other impossible mysteries; it is also about the sociopolitical implications of two opposing conceptions of Christianity and of Catholicism in particular.

Blanc’s third adventure is both a welcome departure and a gratifying return to form. On the one hand, where both Knives Out and Glass Onion are set among wealthy, privileged elites whose smug superiority the films delight in skewering, Wake Up Dead Man is Johnson’s version of a cozy small-town mystery, centered on the very ordinary parishioners of an insular Catholic parish in upstate New York. On the other hand, where Glass Onion stands out as a vengeful fantasy about sticking it to the world’s exploitative, incompetent overlords, Wake Up Dead Man, even more than Knives Out, honors compassion and competence in serving others. Knives Out turns on the heroine being a good and caring nurse; that Fr. Jud is a good and caring priest is even more important here.
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Drama, Religious Themes