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If Glass Onion wasn’t quite the deserving follow-up to Knives Out that many of us had hoped it would be (it was more focused on the bigger rather than better), it was at the very least a deserved victory lap. Writer-director Rian Johnson’s 2019 whodunnit brought us back to the starry, slippery fun of the 70s and 80s, when films like this would be a dime a dozen and it was a surprise hit, making almost eight times its budget at the global box office. While Kenneth Branagh had seen commercial success already with his Poirot revival two years prior, his retreads felt too musty, and the actor-director too miscast, for the genre to truly feel like it was entering an exciting new period.
Johnson’s threequel, Wake Up Dead Man, is the second as part of his Netflix deal (one that cost an estimated $450m) and arrives as the whodunnit genre has found itself close to over-saturation on both big but mostly small screen. Yet as many murders as there might have now been in buildings or residences involving couples and strangers of questionable perfection, nothing has quite captured that same sense of kicky, sharp-witted fun that Johnson had shared with us way back when. His first Knives Out film premiered at the Toronto film festival to one of the most buzzed audience reactions I can remember, a thrill I was able to feel once again as he returned to unveil his latest chapter, a rip-roaring return to form that shows the series to be confidently back on track and heading somewhere with plenty more places to go on the way.
In his introduction, Johnson spoke of the versatility within the whodunnit genre and while this is another assemblage of famous names all facing suspicion from Daniel Craig’s master detective Benoit Blanc again, he told us this one would be a gothic tale with inspiration from Edgar Allen Poe and John Dickson Carr, the stormier dark to Glass Onion’s sunshiney light.
Craig’s second in command is played this time by Josh O’Connor, one of the few recent indie breakouts to find an equally convincing career in more mainstream fare, who stars as Jud, a boxer-turned-priest being handed a new position underneath a controversial small town priest, played by Josh Brolin. His flock is faithful despite his cruel ways and Jud finds himself to be the rare outlier who can’t find anything worth praising. So when he’s killed in a baffling manner, Jud is the main suspect and he has to work with Benoit to find out the truth behind a murder that seems unsolvable.
O’Connor is joined by new recruits Kerry Washington, Glenn Close, Cailee Spaeny, Mila Kunis, Andrew Scott, Daryl McCormack and Jeremy Renner, thankfully not playing himself after his fictional hot sauce made for one of Glass Onion’s least amusing pop culture jokes.
What had spoiled the fun of the last one for me, and limited its rewatchability, was the feeling that Johnson had spent too much time reading the internet while he wrote it, buoyed by the positive reaction to the first film and overdosing on trending gimmickry, relying on humour designed to appeal to a terminally online audience (as a Covid film, that’s somewhat forgivable). Strangely what seems to have fixed the third film is the very same practice but this time it feels like he has been focusing on the bad rather than good response to the second. Gone is the excess, the cameos, the smugness, everything that felt like a distraction and instead, all of that effort has been redirected to the basics of storytelling. Not that the plot here is anything close to basic, it’s as twisty and stuffed with second and third guessing as one would want but its charmingly convoluted nature feels as elegantly composed as it felt in the original, building to a finale that leaves us with a satisfied smile.
In Knives Out, Johnson’s online sensibility was also apparent but it was sparingly used in a smarter way to modernise an old-fashioned template. It’s used considerably more here but in ways that feel similarly thought through. Without clumsily making it the Knives Out film we need right now, Johnson jabs at the growing religious hypocrisy of the far right and how blind faith is warped to uphold figures too focused on the selfishness of power to do any real good. The obvious shadow of Trump looms over Brolin’s vile and destructive head of parish, whose double standards and hateful rhetoric do nothing to quell the unquestioning support of his followers. We have more than enough examples of blunt attacks on a beyond parody president mostly serving to make the left look self-satisfied and impotent and while to those with both ears open, Johnson’s prods are not hard to decipher, they’re embedded in a way that also feels rooted in plot. This time, his knives are out toward bigots, charlatans, opportunists and YouTubers, targets that make it easy for us to cheer when he draws blood.
Craig is as mercifully re-energised as Johnson, after the risk of falling into parody in Glass Onion, the script finding new ways to add depth and discovery to the character and while not all of the new cast members have enough time to shine (Spaeny feels particularly shortchanged), there are no bum notes here with Close and Washington having the most fun aside from a standout O’Connor whose leading man status is now fully confirmed.
Set in upstate New York but filmed in the UK, there are parts of the film that often feel a little too set-based and artificial, not exactly cursed with the Netflix sheen but missing a certain old studio-level authenticity. It’s a minor complaint when the streamer is footing the bill for a series that’s really found its footing again, a wealth of fun to be had in ways that are constantly surprising, a franchise fully woken up.
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Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery is screening at the Toronto film festival and will be released in cinemas on 26 November and on Netflix on 12 December
