Writer and Director: Rian Johnson
Following his classic country house mystery and a group of people trapped on an island, Rian Johnson unpacks his latest box of tricks at the London Film Festival 2025 with this year’s opening Night Gala, Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery. The third movie in this popular crime series brings together some more well-known elements of the genre, combining a locked room mystery with a village setting, all built around the local church. Once again, Johnson proves adept not just paying homage to the great crime plots but bringing them right up to date with a knotted and well managed mystery that underscores the human flaws that motor these evergreen stories. The victim may not last long, but greed, guilt and vengeance is eternal.
Boxer turned priest Jud Duplenticy is sent to a problem parish after disgracing himself in New York during an altercation with another cleric. In Chimney Rock, Jud discovers Monseigneur Wicks has a tight hold over a group of faithfuls who worship him as much as God. But when Jud finds even darker depths, the sudden death of Wicks puts him in the frame for murder and his fate rests in the hands of private detective Benoit Blanc who battles over the Easter weekend to bring the killer to confession.
Johnson really is a master of the genre and his knowledge of crime plots, twisty mysteries and, crucially, how to resolve them in unexpected but satisfying ways makes the Knives Out series so enjoyable. Even if you can work out who the murderer is – and in a starry cast you take a pretty good guess – you won’t necessarily figure out how they did it, so there is great pleasure in watching Johnson gleefully unfold the layers and layers of truth at the root of this puzzle. What is lovely this time is the added respect the film has for Jud and his faith particularly, taking a moment in the frenzied excitement of the murder mystery to speak to needy parishioners and bring comfort. This is a low thrumming theme throughout, placing characters with faith and none together to ask what they believe in – God, humanity, justice – but giving space for them all to exist simultaneously, and it lends an authenticity at least to the central characterisation that gives this outing a bit more meaning when Blanc goes home.
Lovely too is the narrated style – an Agatha Christie approach from novels like Endless Night – that plays with reliability, adding shades of doubt to Josh O’Connor’s Jud in an excellent leading performance. This is O’Connor’s film, drawing in the audience with his confessional confidences, but with a brutal past before the priesthood that leaves room for his own violence and sin to take root. Daniel Craig shrugs Blanc back on like a well-fitting pair of old slippers, enjoying every comedy moment, of which there are many, the eccentricities as well as the brilliant deductive logic and intuition that makes this a continually joyful performance.
Wake Up Dead Man has a tighter supporting cast that Glass Onion but many of them are more superficially drawn, making it a little easier to work out the likely killer, but Josh Brolin as the vile Wicks is fantastic while Glenn Close, Andrew Scott, Mila Kunis and Jeremy Renner make themselves suitably suspicious. On Netflix in time for Christmas, this will be the festive movie everyone is watching but for now, the London Film Festival is off to a flying start.
Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2025 from 8-19 October.
