By Charles Hubbard, Second Year, Theatre & Performance
It’s understandable why Hollywood tends to shy away from making movies about religion. Mid-budget films centred around the Christian faith normally go one of two ways. Either they’re greeted with baffled laughter by agnostic audiences, even as they are embraced by the religious right, as was the case with Cry Freedom (1987) and God’s Not Dead (2014). Or, they incur the kind of visceral religious backlash normally reserved for library books about gay penguins - think Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) or Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979), both of which provoked a hurricane of unearned controversy when first released.
Deeper meditations on faith are normally reserved for independent cinemas, such as First Reformed (2017) or Silence (2016) - both underrated masterpieces that didn’t make a dent at the box office. So it almost seems maverick that every Star Wars fanatic’s either favourite or least favourite director, Rian Johnson, would choose to centre his latest Benoit Blanc mystery around the Catholic Church. Not just that, but present it in a reasonably flattering light.
But I suppose the declaration that ‘sometimes the Catholic Church can be good’ is just the kind of stunning revelation we can expect from Daniel Craig’s Kentucky-born detective. And Wake Up Dead Man (2025), his newest romp, certainly has plenty of stunning revelations to spare.
After assaulting a fellow priest, Revd Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor at his most loveable) is sent to a new parish to the charismatic but bigoted assist Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin, who is incidentally having a great year), only to find that he’s radicalising and toxifying his shrinking congregation of desperate patrons.
After a seemingly impossible murder is committed and Duplenticy made the chief suspect, Craig’s Blanc waltzes onto the scene, proclaiming that no murder, no matter how miraculous it may seem, can’t be explained by simple maths and logic. Does the film support this assertion? Kind of. The brilliance of Johnson’s script is that it neither turns Blanc into a true believer (such a moment would almost certainly ring false for such a seasoned detective), nor condemns O’Connor’s character as an oblivious moron too blinded by his faith to see the clear explanation staring him right in the face. The film explores both the benefits and dangers of organised religion, and it does so without a fear that it’s going to step on anybody’s toes.
A key thing that Wake Up, Dead Man realises that its predecessor, the entertaining but comparably rather hollow Glass Onion (2022), seemed to have forgotten is that you can’t have Benoit Blanc be your POV character. Similar to how Sherlock Holmes is always told through the eyes of his sidekick Watson, Craig’s performance is at once too flamboyant and too inscrutable to properly see the world through his eyes.
Instead, Johnson steals his own trick from the first film, telling the story through the eyes of a morally unfailing innocent who faces so much prejudice from the film’s ensemble that they start to wonder whether they’re actually guilty themself. Trading out Ana de Armas for the equally magnetic Josh O’Connor, the film gleefully blurs the line between fantasy and reality with frequent allusions to biblical events, such as the Lazarus resurrection and Christ knocking at the door to your heart.
Yet, for all the smoke and mirrors, Johnson never lets the narrative slip out of his control and the climactic explanation scene that we have been taught to expect from this franchise is among the most thrilling cinematic sequences I have seen this year.
As much as I love his take on 007, it’s become clear in the last several years that the role of Bond was something that Daniel Craig longed to be rid of. And it’s this film, even more so than last year’s Queer, that makes me frustrated that the Broccolis (the producers of the Bond franchise, not the vegetable) forced him to stay in leading man shape for so long because Blanc with long hair and wrinkles is probably my favourite Blanc yet. It certainly doesn’t hurt that this instalment adds the detail that he’s secretly a big fan of Andrew Lloyd-Webber.
Charles Hubbard
O’Connor plays the role of a tormented priest perfectly, expertly balancing passion, guilt and vulnerability. The one-two-three punch of this, Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind (2025) and the trailer for the new Steven Spielberg movie dropping within a month of one another, has truly cemented him as one of our finest young leading men. If there’s a false note in the supporting cast, it’s relative newcomer Daryl McCormack as Cy Draven, who’s the unlucky victim of Johnson’s annoying tendency to take smirking, toothless jabs at young MAGA-type men and force them all into one character. McCormack unfortunately doesn’t weather the burden quite as well as Dave Batista in Glass Onion.
While it lacks a little of the first film’s swiss-watch economy, stretching out leisurely over a 150 minute runtime, Wake Up, Dead Man is the richest of the franchise, potentially even of Johnson’s entire career. It’s almost amusing to think of Johnson, after making two light, entertaining capers, sitting down to write the third going “All right - here’s for my ultimate treatise on guilt, faith and morality”. But I sure loved the result and can’t wait to see what he comes up with for the fourth!
One thing’s for certain please, please don’t wait for this to come out on Netflix before you watch it. Steve Yedlin’s gorgeous photography and Nathan Johnson’s thunderous score deserve to be experienced on a big screen, not half-watched while folding laundry. It’s getting a limited theatrical release right now, so run, don't walk to catch it!
Featured Image: Charles Hubbard / IMDb
Do you think Wake Up Dead Man is the best of Johnson's whodunnit trilogy?
