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Warning: This post contains spoilers for Wake Up Dead Man.
When a “perfectly impossible” crime is committed at a rural upstate New York church, Southern-fried detective Benoit Blanc is quickly on the case. But this time around, Daniel Craig’s gentleman sleuth needs the help of boxer-turned-junior pastor Father Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor) to solve the twisty whodunnit at hand. Unfortunately, Jud also happens to be the prime suspect in the investigation into the murder of Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude’s fire-and-brimstone head priest, Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin).
Written and directed by Knives Out and Glass Onion filmmaker Rian Johnson, the new Knives Out mystery Wake Up Dead Man diverges from its predecessors’ Agatha Christie roots to delve into the fraught cultural landscape surrounding religion in America. “The reality is that this film did not start with a mystery book at all. It was the idea of, ‘Can I make a fun Benoit Blanc murder mystery that examines the issue of faith in America right now?'” Johnson told Gold Derby. I grew up very, very Christian, and I’m not anymore. The actual starting point, more than a specific Agatha Christie book, was, ‘Can I genuinely examine this complicated, touchy issue in a way that feels more than just finger-wagging, but at the same time doesn’t tiptoe around the subject?'”
However, if you could draw parallels between Wake Up Dead Man and a classic crime book, Johnson explained it would be John Dickson Carr’s 1935 novel The Hollow Man—also published under the American title The Three Coffins—rather than a Christie tale. “[Carr is] an author who was a contemporary of Christie’s and someone who I got very into,” he said. “He specialized in the locked-door mystery, and his books all had more of an Edgar Allen Poe-style gothic tone to them. There’s a reason we namecheck them in the movie. I owe quite a bit to [Carr] with this one.”
Now streaming on Netflix following a limited theatrical release, Wake Up Dead…
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