Faith is always on shaky ground.
You might say that back in the good (or bad) old days, faith had more muscle. You could get burned at the stake for questioning your faith – or at least be run out of town.
Of course, enforcement of religious dogmas has little to do with faith itself. The true human belief in higher power often resides in the cracks between what is outwardly fashionable and what is practical and expedient. It has little to do with institutional prestige. It comes and goes – irrational and wholly angelic.
The struggle of real faith versus its facade is a central theme of Netflix’s Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, forming the foundation for a wonderfully told, dark, hilarious, and warm-hearted narrative.
As we’re all used to by now, there’s a terrific supporting cast, and Josh Brolin in particular shines in a role that has him embody both villain and victim, while Glenn Close, as his faithful church sidekick, has a lot of fun as a woman who’s feverishly devoted to her principles and religious community – but perhaps only up to a point.
There is also a great satirical portrayal of a writer who, in the immortal words of Britney Spears, started believing his own hype and turned into a proto-fascist with an angry cult-like following on Substack (as someone who writes on Substack herself, I shuddered), played by Andrew Scott, who continues to demonstrate his range.
There’s the successful lawyer who has been forced to live in the shadows of others for propriety’s sake, portrayed regally by Kerry Washington. She doesn’t have nearly as much to do here as I would have liked, but Washington is the kind of performer I could watch as she herself watches paint dry, so it almost doesn’t matter.
Jeremy Renner shows up as a successful but weak-willed doctor who gets dumped by his wife in favor of a guy she met on a Phish message board. Daryl McCormack is terrific as a young, Black Republican who has decided that his path to fame lies through betrayal and manipulation. Jeffrey Wright has a fantastic cameo as a disgruntled but razor-sharp bishop, and Thomas Haden Church and Mila Kunis both turn up in small but heartfelt roles.
Josh O’Connor, meanwhile, steals this entire movie as conflicted young priest Jud Duplencity (a great name for this character). In another life, Jud was an aggressive boxer who went too far in the ring one day, and he carries the physical tension of his past through every scene, creating a fantastic foil for Daniel Craig’s cool-eyed Benoit Blanc.
If you haven’t seen the previous Knives Out mysteries, you should do so immediately, but for the sake of this text, Blanc is an eccentric and campy detective for whom solving crimes is pure art.
In this installment, he demonstrates his profound distaste for the church, but also his profound drive to separate the innocent from the guilty.
Johnson is too gifted and energetic to only go for laughs
As with Glass Onion, the previous Knives Out story, current discourse drive the plot. In Onion, it was the theatrical insanity of the out-of-touch billionaire class and their various hangers-on. In Wake Up Dead Man, writer and director Rian Johnson tackles religion in the age of social media – cruelty for clicks, fake spiritual reawakenings, disinformation peddled as miracle, virality vs virtue, it’s all there, but it also doesn’t stifle the soul of the story.
A social satire revolving around a small Catholic parish in which a murder that seems completely impossible has occurred can create easy punchlines, but Johnson is too gifted and energetic to only go for laughs.
Jud’s desire to actually care for his flock animates his every decision, even the seemingly crazy ones. Blanc’s grievances against the church are sincere, but he sees past them and into the heart of the story, and into the heart of Jud’s quest.
Here, Johnson shows us what true human connection can still be like in the age of social media – assuming we put our damn phones down and really connect to each other.
This is a fun mystery movie, but it’s also a wistful ode to small deeds, to the road to hell being paved with good intentions (and, occasionally, expensive jewels), and to how hard it is to build a real community when we’re all too busy shaming and canceling each other online. In an environment imbued by shame, faith can hardly thrive.
It’s up to Jud to restore the balance in his parish, and the fact that he can only do it with the help of a committed non-believer like Benoit Blanc is a reminder that God, Catholic or otherwise, works in mysterious ways.
Sometimes, God’s works are hilarious. Sometimes they are inexplicable. The point is, always, to stick to real faith, and not its cold vestiges.