Knives Out goes Gothic in latest Daniel Craig whodunnit parody

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery
★★★
(M) 144 minutes

For the renowned amateur detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), solving murders is an amusing hobby, a way of flaunting his intellectual gifts. But that’s not the whole story: like his creator Rian Johnson, Blanc is not just a dandy but something of a bleeding heart, regularly opposed to the powers that be.

In his previous cases, he’s gone up against the east coast upper crust (Knives Out) and Silicon Valley (Glass Onion). In Wake Up Dead Man, again written and directed by Johnson for Netflix, he faces a still more formidable adversary in the Catholic Church – though the film is willing to grant not all Catholics should be viewed in the same light.

The youthful, idealistic Reverend Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor) personifies the nobler side of the faith, though even he has his flaws: a former boxer who killed a man in the ring, he’s still capable of violence when his blood is up.

In the wake of one such brawl, he’s dispatched to the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude in upstate New York, where the local monsignor (Josh Brolin) functions as the next thing to an all-powerful deity in his own right, demanding absolute loyalty from his inner circle of devotees.

In various senses, the members of this dysfunctional congregation are yearning to be healed – literally so in the case of a cellist (Cailee Spaeny) whose nerve condition has left her unable to play.

Filling out the all-star cast are devoted church lady Glenn Close, paranoid sci-fi author Andrew Scott, lovelorn doctor Jeremy Renner, self-sacrificing lawyer Kerry Washington and, most instantly dislikeably, Daryl McCormack as the lawyer’s son, a would-be MAGA politician turned YouTuber.

Father Jud’s efforts to preach love and forgiveness aren’t destined to gain much traction with this lot, even before the first corpse comes into view (further in the background are a couple of more laid-back types, Thomas Haden Church as a groundskeeper and Mila Kunis as the brisk police chief).

It’s a tricky game they play, these movies, setting out to be both legitimate whodunnits and parodies of the genre. Wake Up Dead Man is the most self-consciously old-school instalment yet, harking back to the tradition of the Gothic novel: the background to the mystery spans generations, with a hidden treasure and a couple of illegitimate children among the many buried secrets brought to light.

Considering the games played by Johnson in the past, we can’t even be sure Father Jud’s own testimony should be taken at face value, though O’Connor’s performance leaves no doubt that Jud is at least a good listener – the first requirement for a priest, one would think – and a man of more depth than the satirical cartoons that surround him.

If anything, O’Connor is too good for the film, making it harder for Johnson to sustain his usual mildly camp tone where everything is in quotation marks. The moment we’re asked to take any of this hokum halfway seriously, the social commentary starts to look a bit preachy, the plotting more than a bit creaky, and the facetious dialogue in need of reining in: however willing we might be to suspend disbelief, having Father Jud describe himself as “young, dumb and full of Christ” is a step too far.

Nor is the thematic logic entirely under control, especially when Blanc, a man of reason rather than faith, starts to loom over the action like a god in his own right. Still, Craig’s showboating remains as amusing as ever – and Johnson is so plainly enthralled by his own gift for spinning tales that the lapses are easy to forgive.

Reviewed by Jake Wilson

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery is in cinemas from Thursday, November 27.