Wake Up Dead Man: A Benoit Blanc Mystery (2025) at New Orleans Film Festival
The original Knives Out was one of the best films of 2019, as well as this writer's pick for best movie year of the 2010s. While the third installment Wake Up Dead Man: A Benoit Blanc Mystery may not quite reach those heights, it's an improvement over the series' second installment and is a movie with weighty themes that still manages to be funny and highly entertaining.
Daniel Craig's master detective Benoit Blanc appears in the first shot of the film then promptly disappears for the remainder of the movie's first third (it runs 141 minutes). The focus is Father Jud (Josh O'Connor), a young priest with a troubled and violent past who yearns to be a source of comfort for other troubled people in the world.
Father Jud is assigned to a rural New York parish with a dwindling membership. Its leader, Monsignor Wicks (Josh Brolin), has alienated all but a hardcore group of parishioners with combative, ultra-right-wing sermons. Wicks is not thrilled at Father Jud's arrival and makes an effort to mess with him at every opportunity. Soon, there is a murder and Father Jud is the prime suspect.
The bewildering locked-room nature of the mystery attracts Blanc to the case. Blanc does not think Father Judy is guilty, so his attention turns to the parishioners: a fanatically loyal rectory manager (Glenn Close), a drunken doctor (Jeremy Renner), a bitter sci-fi author (Andrew Scott), a lawyer (Kerry Washington), her failed politician/influencer son (Daryl McCormack), and a disabled musician (Cailee Spaeny).
The film addresses questions of faith, forgiveness, and the nature of religion itself. Blanc takes a rationalist approach and Father Jud, while aware of all of the flaws of organized religion, believes it still can be a force for good in the world and has endured for centuries for a reason. Writer/director Rian Johnson (and O'Connor in the performance) do a great job of making Father Jud into a character who is flawed but also very sympathetic.
There is also a lot of pointed satire here about the right-wing radicalization that has happened to some sections of the church in the past decade or so. Johnson, unlike some other modern filmmakers, is able to present these points deftly. It never feels like a sermon. It's handled in a funny, entertaining way.
Wake
Up Dead Man is
a Netflix film that will play for two weeks in local theaters starting November
26 before appearing on Netflix in mid-December, but you really should try to
see it in a theater. The screening at the New Orleans Film Festival was packed
and the shared laughter at the movie's many funny parts absolutely enhanced the
experience. Communal movie experiences should and do matter (no matter how
doggedly Netflix insists they do not), so see this with an audience if you have
time during its too-brief release window.
