Daniel Craig’s swaggering private detective Benoit Blanc returns in this church-based whodunnit satire, which blends Gothic camp with irresistible mystery
There is nothing Daniel Craig could have done, post-Bond, that is better for his legacy than Knives Out. In 2019 he made his debut as Benoit Blanc, a larger-than-life private detective with a hokey, suave Southern drawl, fashion-forward suits and a penchant for solving the most mysterious of murder cases. The film became an instant cult classic, and turned into a Netflix franchise: its second film, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, landed in 2022, and the third is released today in select cinemas before its perfectly timed pre-Christmas arrival on Netflix on 12 December.
Though all three films have maintained the same director – Rian Johnson, who also directed Star Wars: The Last Jedi – the first two diverged in style. The first took the form of a classic whodunnit, featuring a rickety old house and dysfunctional family warring over the inheritance of the victim (their patriarch, a bestselling crime writer). The second felt much more avant-garde: a Covid story of a group of elites invited to a private island to play a murder mystery game. Despite its all-star cast, Glass Onion felt, compared to the original, a little forced.
What a joy, then, that the third, Wake Up Dead Man, reverts to that more traditional feel, resulting in a smart, funny, Gothic-camp romp that you will wish you could watch anew over and over again. It follows boxer-turned-Catholic priest Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor) as he is dispatched to a rural community to shake things up among a troubled flock currently led by the cruel and pugilistic pastor Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (a ferocious Josh Brolin), who implores his congregation to fight back against a world that “wants to destroy us”.
Daniel Craig as the newly bearded, swooshy-haired Benoit Blanc (Photo: Netflix)
Jud, by contrast, is an empathetic, reflective young man – but he turned to the clergy after he accidentally killed someone in the ring. When Wicks drops dead mid-service, stabbed in a sealed room, Jud – who challenged Wicks’s punishing sermon style and grew increasingly frustrated at being forced to listen to his graphic confessions of masturbation – becomes the prime suspect. We are back, as police chief Geraldine (a sanguine, exasperated Mila Kunis) puts it, to “some Scooby-Doo shit”.
The small congregation is a mixed bag: devout lifer Martha (Glenn Close); type-A lawyer Vera (Kerry Washington); mid-divorce doctor Nat (Jeremy Renner) and bestselling thriller writer Lee Ross (Andrew Scott), to name a few. As usual, defining the group of characters – and other possible suspects – so clearly gives the whole thing the feel of a game of Cluedo. But this is less cosy crime and more religious-horror satire, more jumpy and bloody than previous instalments – and with a trace of the supernatural. The resplendent Close as Martha helps with the spooky atmosphere, her black dresses and searching eyes recalling a ghostly Victoriana.
There’s hefty backstory – the church, long-helmed by Wicks’ family, harbours some terrible secrets – that means it takes longer than usual for Blanc to turn up, but when he does, now bearded and swooshy-haired like a suburban dad post-lockdown, he doesn’t disappoint. Savvy as always, Blanc looks straight into Jud’s puppy-dog brown eyes and sees innocence. He enlists him into helping him crack the case and absolve himself while the flock crumbles and fractures at the loss of their beloved Monsignor.
Mila Kunis, Daniel Craig and Josh O’Connor in Wake Up Dead Man (Photo: Netflix)
What follows is what we might now call vintage Knives Out: we revisit the same scenes multiple times from different perspectives while Blanc pieces it all together and finds new details through unconventional methods (no forensics, just vibes). It has a slick, stylised, highly modern feel, blending crime-lovers’ references (like an extended sequence on John Dickson Carr’s 1953 novel The Hollow Man) with Catholic bombast and a winking irony brought by its starry cast. Craig plays Blanc as a sort of single-malt Sherlock Holmes, magnetic and hilarious (“flesh and bloody, higgly wiggly,” he drawls bemusedly as he prods at the corpse), supported by a fantastic O’Connor as the conflicted, self-doubting and faithful Pastor Jud.
The conclusion, when it finally comes, after multiple red herrings, trip-ups and mishaps that leave us as confused as the police department, is a satisfying slam-dunk, lurching once again through previously seen parts of the narrative to reveal new details. Melodramatic to the end, it’s difficult to imagine a more perfect home-watch film for cosy winter nights. Knives Out die-hards: we are back.
