Before I do my dubious year-end wrap up, one final movie: Wake Up Dead Man (2025), a Knives OUt sequel.
It starts with Josh O'Connor, a young priest decking another priest. It seems he used to be a boxer until he killed a man in the ring and turned to the Church. He assigned to a lovely church in New York, Our Lady of Perpetual Whining. The head priest there is Josh Brolin, a charismatic but confrontational man. He tends to select members of the parish, call out their sins with fire and brimstone and drive them out of the church. The exceptions are his little cult:
- Jeremy Renner, a doctor whose divorce has driven him to drink
- Andrew Scott, a sci-fi writer who has stopped producing to write a true-life spiritual biography of Brolin
- Kerry Washington, a lawyer who puts loyalty to the church and her adopted son above her career
- Daryl McCormack, the adopted son, an arrogant right-wing influencer and wannabe politician
- Cailee Spaeny, a concert cellist, suffering from debilitating muscle pain, hoping for a miracle
Glenn Close plays the woman who keeps the church running, and Thomas Hayden Church the groundskeeper who worships her (and sometimes swats her bottom).
During Mass, Brolin would often become fatigued, and step into a small alcove near the altar, and O'Connor would perform the offices until he recovered. One Sunday, while he was tucked away, the congregation heard a thud. Brolin had been killed, stabbed in the back with a devil-headed knife. A devil's head that O'Connor was known to have taken from a bar.
It was a classic locked-room mystery. No one could have entered or left the alcove, no mechanism or trap was found, and O'Connor, known to be at odds with Brolin, was in plain sight the whole time. Police chief Mila Kunis did the right thing: call Benoit Blanc.
I won't go into the twists and turns of the mystery, except to say that there wasn't as much of a big mid-movie twist as I expected after Glass Onion (although there is a glorious knockout punch). I will say that the cast is awesome as usual. The characters were interesting - like in Onion, many caricatures of right-wing types. I was interested in Scott's author character - he resembled P.K. Dick in some ways: a pulpy sci-fi writer who got obsessed with Bishop Pike later in life.
It's also a beautiful movie in many ways - the neo-gothic church, the forest outside it, the cozy, yet threatening rectory. And of course, Daniel Craig's Blanc, an egotist stumped by a mystery, an atheist who granted his quarry grace, and all without losing his faith in himself and reason.
Watching this made us hungry for more - so we watched some of Branagh's Poirot. Not quite the same, but you can see the connections.
