Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery

Are you ready for Benoit Blanc’s most dangerous case yet? Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery is the third film featuring the Southern-fried detective crafted with writer-director Rian Johnson's signature touch — but this time, it ventures into a darker, more gothic tone.

Johnson riffs on the dark, gothic elements of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue — a seemingly impossible locked-room scenario involving a corpse — while still incorporating many of the series’ signature elements. Set in a small town and focusing on its local church, Wake Up Dead Man is packed with stars, including Josh O’Connor as a the younger cleric to Josh Brolin’s autocratic, abrasive priest, Glenn Close as his right-hand person, plus Kerry Washington, Andrew Scott, Cailee Spaeny, Jeremy Renner (whose likeness had a memorable appearance in Glass Onion), and Mila Kunis as a local cop who is as determined as Blanc to solve this seemingly insoluble case. And there’s a murder that presents itself as an impossible crime. All that and Craig delivers perhaps his best Blanc yet.

The latest entry in one of the most successful mystery series in recent film history is as strong, inventive, and entertaining as ever.

Screening November 27 at Luna Leederville, Luna on SX and the Windsor.