Wake Up Dead Man

dir: Rian Johnson

2025

It’s hard to talk about a film that’s really about faith without sounding like I’m succumbing to the religious bullshit we snorkel through in every day life (as atheists, obviously believers and godbotherers don’t have this problem). This film isn’t about religion, or against religion per se, but it’s not coming from the usual place you’d expect when it comes to which side it’s on.

Daniel Craig, again playing detective Benoit Blanc for the third time, might seem to be a stand in for the director, or the main character in this ambiguously named flick, but it’s not really about him, and I feel like Josh O’Connor plays the real main character. For most of the flick, or at least the entirety of the first half, he’s relating the events he experienced leading up to the murder of a beloved monsignor, in the hopes of enlisting someone’s aid in proving his innocence. It’s O’Connor who somehow walks away with the film, somehow managing to credibly and believably portray something I had no idea was still possible, being an earnest Catholic priest who actually believes in his faith and who actually wants to love and help people.

That in itself is something of a miracle. He even does okay with the American accent, which couldn’t have been easy against the Foghorn Leghorn bullshit of Benoit Blanc (admittedly with the volume turned way down this time around).

Even with these solid performers in the mix, there’s also towering performances from Josh Brolin and Glenn Close to compete with, since this flick is somewhat more dramatically serious and less openly comedic than the earlier two movies (Glass Onion especially, which was way more farce than class). All the while I don’t want to make the flick sound like a slog; murder mysteries after all aren’t meant to be stolidly ‘serious’ cinema, unless you’re talking about the true crime variety. It’s meant to almost be fun and breezy, despite the number of bodies piling up.

These films are never about grief over who died, they’re whodunits and howdunits, and even then, I hesitate to mention, the good versions of these mean that the actual solution doesn’t really matter that much, it’s just punctuation at the end. This film, being a self-aware entity, even knows this, mentions all the predictable plot requirements and sources (locked room mysteries, or impossible crimes) and only subverts them in the mildest of manners.

Because ultimately it’s in love with its protagonist, being the good priest Father Jud Duplenticy, and wants to do right by him, and so does Benoit, who seems confounded by Jud’s authentic faith.

This is of course in contrast with the evil priest played by Josh Brolin, and wow, fucking hell, he is a monster. Brolin may have played a supervillain in the Marvel movies who tried to wipe out half of all sentient life in the universe, but his character here of Monsignor Jefferson Wicks is somehow worse, and way nastier.

This is a chap that believes in nothing, but has a devoted coterie who he shamelessly domineers and exploits. They are all so enthralled by him that we are meant to think that there’s no way one of them could have done it, but then no-one could need him dead as much as these people. In Wicks we have a blowhard who literally preaches hellfire and brimstone from a pulpit designed to look like the prow of a ship, talking the culture war bullshit that gets certain sections of American society salivating, and yet he believes none of it.

He actively drives other parishioners away. He delights in doing so, which, if you know anything about churches, is the opposite of what they’re meant to be doing. I don’t mean that bullshit about being inclusive and embracing people from everywhere united by their belief in a magical carpenter who died 2000 years ago: I mean churches need bums on seats because that equals money. Money above all else. That collection plate isn’t going to fill itself.

But no, Wicks doesn’t need a bigger congregation than his core group. He gets all the money he could need out of one of them, being Simone (Cailee Spaeny), a disabled cellist desperate for a spiritual cure for her chronic pain. She diverts all her wealth to Wicks in anticipation of a miracle that always seems to be just around the corner.

The others, well, I don’t know at all what goes on in the minds of these empty monsters, these voids of unending need, but he must be keeping them around for a reason. There’s Cy (Daryl McCormack), who is a wannabe influencer trying to get into political office who can’t quite get there even though he says all the reactionary outrage bating things and is terminally online. He might not realise that he’s utterly devoid of charisma (or a soul for that matter), but in Wicks he sees someone who could, I dunno, get a million followers on Youtube with his hateful, paranoid preaching, and could ride that to glory, dragging Cy along with him. He has no interest in the Catholic faith whatsoever.

There’s a drunk doctor obsessed with getting back with his ex-wife (Jeremy Renner), there’s a no longer popular racist author whose books are only sought by chubby middle-aged preppers in vests (the always delightful Andrew Scott, who is not delightful here at all), and of course there’s Martha (Glenn Close), whose entire life is devoted more to Wicks than the church, but she does actually believe in something.

Jud is sent to this parish almost as something of a punishment, or more to get him out of the way, and from the day he appears it is fairly clear Wicks doesn’t want him around, and Wicks flick don’t much care for him either. But Wicks’ thing, really, is that he’s a sadist. He was brought up in a fractured household with a detested mother figure and the misogynistic mindset that would ensure his view of the world wouldn’t only align with the Catholic one / standard patriarchal bullshit, but exceed it.

There is a family mystery, regarding Eve’s apple and something that happened when Wicks was young, and his poor mother went mad, and of course it ties in with the reasons for the murders that ensue, but this is Rian Johnson being a clever clogs, telling us that he can craft a plot as involved and intricate as anything Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh or contemporary hacks like Richard Osman could come up with, and honestly that element didn’t strike me as that innovative or interesting. The funny thing for me was that I really didn’t care about how it had all been done, or even really why.

But I did care that Benoit deliberately stopped himself from doing the cliché big reveal in the parlour room with all the suspects attendant, setting it all out for everyone to see, to rub his superiority in the face of the guilty party. He completely steps back from that. That interested me, and the reasons why were somewhat powerful as well.

It is Jud’s genuine example, of wanting to find out who done it not for the punishment aspect, not for justice, not for the obvious self-interest, but to be able to give them the opportunity to confess and to ask for forgiveness. To offer them grace instead of condemnation.

How radical. It’s something that only a non-believer could construct.

Josh O’Connor is having a moment currently, and is in like every film currently, including three that I’ll be reviewing in quick succession. I keep thinking of him as a young upstart, up and comer, but the reality is he’s in his mid 30s, and has being acting for decades. Of course he has a gawky kind of energy, but it suits the character he’s playing here. I don’t know what he’s best known for, whether it’s his stint on The Durrells as Lawrence Durrell, or as Prince Charles in The Crown, or maybe as the rapacious Patrick in Challengers, but to me he’ll always be a guy with a very punchable face who looks like he’s always taking the piss. He’s not here, or if he is, he pulled the wool over my eyes. I actually believed the character he was playing, in terms of a man who did a great wrong (he killed a man in the boxing ring when he was young), but wants to make amends for the rest of his life, by showing others that Jesus welcomes all and forgives all who come with an open heart and genuine repentance in their souls, and he tries to live that life by example. The great Jeffrey Wright has a small role as his bishop / boss, and it made me wish he was around more, because he’s always great. And it’s delightful to see him believe in Jud when no-one else does.

As previously mentioned O’Connor is great, Brolin is a hilarious and terrifying monster, but Glenn Close deserves her flowers for walking away with the ending of the film, not to spoil anything, but I genuinely loved the ending of the flick, convenient and overly drawn out as it is. Maybe this flick didn’t need to be 2 and a half hours long, but then maybe Michelangelo’s David didn’t need to be 5.17 metres tall.

I do love Daniel Craig playing this character, and his conversations with Jud are the highlights of the flick. As a non-believer, an adamant one at that, he is not likely to fall prey to the tantalising rewards offered by an invisible guy who lives in the sky and watches us all masturbate. But he does feel some yearning, perhaps, towards the sublime, but in a more earth-bound sense, a yearning towards having faith in humanity, or at least one man, once again.

Wake Up, Dead Man, time to die.

8 times contemporary America is an engine generating nothing but imbecilic rage out of 10

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“Helping Benoit Blanc crack the mystery of the evil, evil church and then some libtard will make a podcast about all of this and before you know it, the idiot versions of all of us will end up on Netflix.” – fingers crossed - Wake Up Dead Man