Wake Up Dead Man review: Rian Johnson’s murder mystery tickles your brain and your funny bone

The allure of an impossible mystery is too tempting to resist.

When there are so many questions in life, all those unknowables and unsolvables, never underestimate how comforting it is to have Daniel Craig explain to you exactly how a murder was pulled off.

Justice served. Everything is right with the world. Well, not everything, but at least one thing you can control.

Wake Up Dead Man is the third instalment in Rian Johnson’s Knives Out movies, another twisty murder mystery that tickles not just your brain but your funny bone.

An elaborately plotted story about faith, demonisation and grace, Wake Up Dead Man has gothic vibes and is closer in tone to the original Knives Out than its farce-forward follow-up, Glass Onion.

It also has an incredible cast, led by Josh O’Connor who serves as the emotional core of the film, and whose presence and talents are undeniable. All the more important considering O’Connor has to carry the film for 45 minutes before Craig’s Benoit Blanc shows up.

O’Connor plays Jud Duplenticy, a young priest who is sent to a troublesome parish in a small town in New York state. Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude is run by Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin), a dreadful man who revels in division and bitterness.

The grandson of the church’s founder, Wicks screams fire and brimstone, and demands vengeance against those who seek to diminish the power of those he believes has a God-given right to rule over a “Christian nation”, as in, people who look and sound like him.

Any echoes to real-life counterparts is not coincidental. Johnson’s work has always been in conversation with the cultural contexts in which they’re made.

When Wicks is killed in a seemingly impossible murder, everyone in his close group of supporters becomes a suspect.

There’s Martha (Glenn Close), a devout and judgmental woman who has been in service to the church since she was a child, Dr Nat (Jeremy Renner), the town doctor with a propensity for the drink, Vera (Kerry Washington), an uptight lawyer who has been forced into a life she doesn’t want, her adopted son Cy (Daryl McCormack), an ultra-right wannabe politician, Lee (Andrew Scott), a sci-fi writer, and Simone (Cailee Spaeny), a talented musician with debilitating pain.

The cast also includes Mila Kunis as the local police chief, Jeffrey Wright as a senior cleric in the church and Bridget Everett.

Johnson comes from a religious family and spent a chunk of his childhood in Orange County, a right-wing outpost of southern California. He has said when he went to university, he re-interrogated his beliefs, and you can see that continuing conversation in this film.

Jud is idealistic and warm-hearted, and is genuinely trying to be a good reverend for his community, but he is tested by the domineering and hateful Wicks. He is also still contending with his guilt for having killed a man in the boxing ring when he was 17 years old.

Jud encapsulates the hope that Johnson has, that Americans and people in general, can find a way to believe in a better version of the world, that there is a way back from the seething hatred that drives public discourse and cleaves one from another.

You don’t leave Wake Up Dead Man without thinking about forgiveness and grace, and what we owe to each other and ourselves.

That Johnson can weave all that together in what is still a romp filled with witty dialogue, cracking jokes (including a howler about toxic Star Wars fans, a group he’s all too familiar with after directing The Last Jedi), and genuine pathos speaks to his ability as a storyteller who can balance audience-focused entertainment with quality filmmaking.

Wake Up Dead Man doesn’t have all the answers to all that plagues us but it will reliably tell us who did it.

Rating: 4/5

Wake Up Dead Man is in cinemas now and on Netflix from December 12