By Matthew Moorcroft

Highest Recommendation

• Directed by Rian Johnson
• Starring Daniel Craig, Josh O’Connor, Glenn Close, Josh Brolin
• PG-13

One of the best things about modern day cinema is that every couple of years, without fail, there is a new Benoit Blanc mystery available to us. The latest, Wake Up Dead Man, is probably the biggest swerve of them yet, removing itself from the class critiques of the prior entries and heading straight into the realm of smaller town isolation. A necessary swerve for sure, as while the qualities of Knives Out and Glass Onion are mighty aplenty, one of the great things about murder mysteries like this is how they can occupy legions of different settings, ideas, themes, and characters all the while maintaining their signature stylings of a killing, the suspects, and the eventual reveal, as clinical as it all is.

But the one thing it does keep from prior entries, something that isn’t unique to the Benoit Blanc films but certainly is key to Johnson’s filmography, is that playful sense of subversion and unpredictability. Knives Out used it’s murder mystery conceit to have a murder mystery where we knew who the murderer was – only to have the rug pulled out from under us. Glass Onion was barely a mystery at all and that was part of the joke, a complete farce of a plan that anybody with half a brain cell could solve with the real mystery being why anybody would actually fall for it. In the case of Wake Up Dead Man, it comes in the form of it’s premise; how do you solve a mystery with a group of people who don’t want the mystery to be actually solved? Turns out – you rely on faith.

With it’s gothic setting, individuals almost as chilly as the air around them, and that playfulness a little bit more subdued this time around, Wake Up Dead Man is utterly wonderful as per expected but it’s also significantly more soulful and introspective then you would expect. It’s murder is well crafted and intricate – and fitting of the setting and themes – and it’s ensemble cast is as engaging as ever, even if they are a little bit more in the background this time around as Wake Up Dead Man is much more of a double act then prior entries. That double act is the always reliable Daniel Craig as Blanc himself but also Josh O’Connor as Rev. Judd, a younger priest who just wants to do some good.

It’s Judd who is the beating heart of the picture, as the murder of his much older, much more conservative, and much angrier parish leader Wicks is murdered mysteriously in a storage closet in a crime that should be impossible. Judd’s blame for the murder from the parishioners – made up of a variety of suspects who are mostly Wick’s inner circle – is one based out of fear, exclusion of the other, and a need to find a target for their own misery instead of looking inward. After all, it’s what Wick teaches, it’s what much of the current faith teaches, and Judd is having none of it.

That broken institution turns out to be more significant then the murder itself, as much of the meat of Wake Up Dead Man is in Blanc and Judd’s opposing viewpoints and ideologies clashing. Blanc, maybe selfishly, just wants to be finish the case and solve the murder so he can prove it to the world, while Judd just wants some level of peace, grace, and forgiveness to both himself as well whoever did the crime. And as Steve Yedlin’s moody, shadowy cinematography begins to darken over the film like a cloud, the motivations of our killer gets it itself darker and more mysterious until it hits Blanc like a beam of light from the grace of God himself.

Needless to say, Johnson’s script is as immaculate as ever. As one of the best writers in the business at the moment, Johnson’s trademark wit and deadpan humor are everywhere here but he combines it now with a formalism to his directing and a humanist touch in how he handles it’s themes that separate Wake Up Dead Man from it’s predecessors. A lot of Wake Up Dead Man is almost written like a religious parable in of itself, with Johnson’s heavy focus on foggy memory and personal biases at their highest here (pay attention to how almost every version of the same flashback is portrayed differently). And despite being upwards of 2 and a half hours, it zips by without much of a blink, feeling like a full course meal with room for some dessert at the end in case you wanna rewatch his prior outings.

It’s easy to say that these movies are the best, most consistent franchise in Hollywood at the moment, but sometimes the easiest thing to say is the truth. While Wake Up Dead Man does show that admitting the truth to yourself can be a bitter pill to swallow at points, the quality of these films is anything but bitter and Wake Up Dead Man might be the high point of an already spectacular trilogy of films. And personally, I hope Johnson continues to make these well into the future.