Producers: Ram Bergman and Rian Johnson Director: Rian Johnson Screenplay: Rian Johnson Cast: Daniel Craig, Josh O’Connor, Glenn Close, Josh Brolin, Mila Kunis, Jeremy Renner, Kerry Washington, Andrew Scott, Cailee Spaeny, Daryl McCormack, Thomas Haden Church, Jeffery Wright, Annie Hamilton, Bridget Everett, James Faulkner and Noah Segan Distributor: Netflix
Grade: B+
After a bit of a sophomore slump with the second of his Knives Out series “Glass Onion” (2022), which was amusing but rather overblown, Riann Johnson bounces back with this quasi-“locked room” murder mystery set at a small Catholic parish in upper New York. The fact that it’s a borrowed sort of plot is admitted by its references to classic examples of the genre, especially John Dickson Carr’s 1935 masterpiece “The Hollow Man,” though at one point one can glimpse the titles of others, like Agatha Christie’s “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd” (1925).
Though Daniel Craig returns as that deep-drawl Southern sleuth Benoit Blanc, he shares the screen once again with a starry ensemble. The person who falls under suspicion is young Father Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor), a former boxer who impulsively socked a deacon for reasons never fully explained. Understanding Bishop Langstrom (Jeffery Wright) punishes him leniently by sending him to serve as assistant to Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin) at Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude in tiny Chimney Rock.
But this is no case of “Going My Way.” Wicks is utterly hostile to having Duplenticy forced upon him despite the fact that his congregation has dwindled to a mere handful of regulars, a circumstance explained by Wicks’s habit of driving away any newcomers by issuing thundering, precisely calibrated, condemnations designed to insult them from the pulpit. In this way the Monsignor has whittled his flock down to a few true believers in his uncompromisingly traditionalist views.
There’s alcoholic doctor Nat Sharp (Jeremy Renner), still agonizing over the fact that his wife left him, along with their kids; cool as a cucumber attorney Vera Draven (Kerry Washington); her stepbrother Cy Draven (Daryl McCormack), a failed politician now trying to use the web to promote his hard-right views by posting Wicks’s diatribes; Lee Ross (Andrew Scott), a once-bestselling novelist whose popularity nosedived after his writing turned into Wicks-promotion; young cellist Simone Vivane (Cailee Spaeny), whose promising career was sidetracked by an illness that’s left her in a wheelchair and who now hopes that Wicks’s spiritual power can restore her to health; and longtime parish groundskeeper Samson Holt (Thomas Haden Church), who lives in the garage beside the tomb of Father Prentice Wicks (James Faulker), Jefferson’s grandfather, who amassed a fortune—and sired daughter Grace (Annie Hamilton)–before becoming a priest and actually built the church.
Finally. there’s Martha Delacroix (Glenn Close), Wicks’s fanatically devoted housekeeper, who basically keeps the parish running—maintaining the books, sprucing up the vestments and playing the organ at services. She’s been around since Prentice’s time and knows where the skeletons are buried, even remembering how Grace ransacked the church after her father’s death; she’s also extremely close to Holt, who will do anything she asks.
(Some Catholics may be miffed about the suggestion that a parish could be this sort of family-owned-and-operated enterprise, or the idea that a bishop couldn’t remove and replace a problematic pastor at will. My advice is to calm down; this is fiction, not reality, and fiction of the same sort that allowed Christie to depict Anglican parishes as she did—or the likes of Eliot and Trollope, for that matter. It’s fun, not fact.)
In any event, the plot proper begins when the Monsignor meets an untimely end during the Holy Week services leading up to Easter. He’s stabbed in the back while saying mass, after retreating to a small closet off the sanctuary for a brief rest. Father Jud is the first to reach him and is found by the others clutching the knife that’s the murder weapon. Though he claims to be innocent, it’s no wonder that Sheriff Scott (Mila Kunis) considers him the chief suspect. And he’s torn himself, still wracked with guilt over having once killed an opponent in the boxing ring—the event that led him to the priesthood.
But who should appear but Blanc, intent on unraveling the truth. (One might chalk it up to divine intervention, if it weren’t for his being an unbeliever. But Johnson allows him to be bathed in a shaft of heavenly light coming through a stained-window and mount the pulpit to deliver his case summation, and to show a gesture of grace to a perpetrator even at a cost to his reputation.) He and Duplenticy slowly wend their way to the truth through a series of events as convoluted as those in any Christie plot—stunning revelations, long-buried secrets, another murder, even a resurrection just in time for Easter. If you want plausibility, you’d better look elsewhere.
But while admittedly incredible, the circuitous journey to the solution proves an engaging journey. Craig once again brings his rationalistic Southern demeanor to Blanc, and O’Connor makes a sympathetic suspect. All the supporting players fill their caricature-like parts admirably, but Brolin and Close stand out, the one for his malevolent rage (his “confessions” to Duplenticy are masterpieces of sarcastic malice) and the other for her skill in capturing elderly Martha’s single-minded intensity. But one shouldn’t overlook Wright’s tongue-in-cheek turn, or the contribution of Bridget Everett as a secretary at a construction firm who provides a crucial piece of information.
And the film has been lovingly made. Rick Heinrich’s production design has a lovely artificiality which cinematographer Steve Yedin bathes in luminous light and creepy shadow as appropriate. Editor Bob Ducsay lets things unfold without rushing, giving the clues time to sink in, while Nathan Johnson contributes a cheeky score.
“Wake Up Dead Man” has points to make about contemporary political culture and its deleterious connection with organized religion, but they’re not allowed to overwhelm the basic plot. Like the classic “impossible crime” novels it emulates, it’s a likably wacky mystery that leaves you smiling in the wake of its cartoonishly murderous mayhem.