What are we to make of Rian Johnson’s Knives Out films? There is certainly an element of pastiche here. The sequence, featuring a hero with unmistakable flavours of Hercule Poirot, takes its cue from the best-known Agatha Christie novels and their more lavish adaptations.
The first was set around an archetypal big house. Glass Onion, the second, like Christie’s And Then There Were None, had victims being peeled off on a remote island. The new film’s embrace of another familiar location for the late queen of crime highlights both the possibilities and the pitfalls of such an approach.
This time around, Benoit Blanc, in the still-ripe form of Daniel Craig, is investigating a crime that gave Christie one of her most familiar titles: a murder at the vicarage. Okay, we’re not strictly in such a location here. The crime occurs in a US Catholic church rather than in a Church of England residence, but, filming in outer London, Johnson looks to be making every effort to bring us back to Miss Marple’s St Mary Mead as represented in classic BBC adaptations.
Our stand-in protagonist until the crime occurs is a guilt-ridden priestly former boxer – he killed a man in the ring, as did Sean Thornton in The Quiet Man – in the currently unavoidable (and still welcome) form of Josh O’Connor.
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This Fr Jud Duplenticy is, partly as punishment, dispatched to Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude Church in upstate New York, where he immediately falls under the shadow of Josh Brolin’s terrifying Msgr Jefferson Wicks. This hulking hellfire preacher has gathered something like a cult following among locals who, we suspect from the beginning, are being set up as potential suspects (or maybe victims).
There is an art to casting such broadly drawn characters, and on balance Johnson has got it spot on. Andrew Scott is on edge as a science-fiction writer now in conversation with God. Daryl McCormack is amusingly slippery as an aspiring Maga politician. Glenn Close is hilariously off the dial as Wicks’s devoutly deranged right-hand woman. And so on through Cailee Spaeny’s troubled cellist and Thomas Haden Church’s burly handyman.
Celebrity is useful here. With so many personalities, and with characterisation so slim, it’s useful to have a familiar face on which to hang your suspicions.
Johnson is ardent about allowing no spoilers into the atmosphere. So we need only say that, deep into the film, somebody is murdered in the sort of locked-room mystery that so amused the crime writer John Dickson Carr (who is mentioned explicitly in the script). There was no way in to the murder scene. There was no way out.
If this were not a Blanc film one might expect Jud to be chief investigator – a descendant of Fr Brown, perhaps. There is an amusing switch. GK Chesterton’s clerical sleuth often also arrived late in the story, but here it is Craig’s lay detective who, Creole accent in tow, roles up to relegate Fr Jud to assistant status.
The previous two films have been a little too extravagant for their own good: expensive, flashy, glamorous. Wake Up Dead Man could also do with some reining in. It is 15 minutes too long and, with all the emotional and literal clamour, loses some of the intimacy you desire for a rural golden-age-of-crime lampoon.
To be fair, Johnson is trying to do more than that. Digs at contemporary US political discontents are well aimed. The film is alert to its own time-shifted unreality.
But, at its heart, Wake Up Dead remains a huge-budget variation on Sunday-evening mystery telly. As such, it will entertain Netflix viewers over Christmas. Though one or two might wonder if the streamer could have got three or four Poirots and a Marple for the same money.
Streams on Netflix from Friday, December 12th
