Wake Up Dead Man Is Drastically Revamping The Knives Out Formula
Get ready for a locked-sacristy mystery.
Knives Out has already redefined the murder mystery genre as we know it. Rian Johnson’s love letter to mystery movies (not to be confused with Poker Face, his love letter to mystery TV shows) has already covered two subgenres. The first installment, Knives Out, is the classic inheritance squabble, while the second, Knives Out: Glass Onion, leaned harder on the critique of capitalism and satire of the class system.
In the upcoming third chapter, Knives Out: Wake Up Dead Man, Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) takes on something entirely new: a Gothic conundrum. Set in a small-town parsonage, this Knives Out story trades the rich guy victims for something a little more intriguing: claims of a miracle. Check out the trailer for the upcoming movie below:
“A man gives a sermon,” Blanc says over clips of Msgr. Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin) delivering what looks to be a fire-and-brimstone homily. “He then, in plain sight of everyone, walks into a sealed concrete box. And 30 seconds later, that man is lying dead.”
With the congregants, from the high-powered lawyer (Kerry Washington) to the famous author (Andrew Scott) all suspects, Blanc has to work with bumbling priest Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor) to solve what may be the most intriguing murder mystery subgenre: the locked-room mystery, a crime with no crime scene clues at all to work with, a seemingly immaculate murder with no source at all.
Josh O’Connor and Daniel Craig in Netflix’s Knives Out: Wake Up Dead Man.
Locked-room mysteries have been around as long as mystery stories themselves, but they always deliver something a little different: Usually, the solution to the “impossible crime” is far stranger than your typical mystery. Take, for example, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of the Speckled Band,” which featured someone murdered in their locked room. As it turns out, the actual murder weapon was a venomous snake slipped in through a vent. Not the most obvious answer, but in Holmes’ own words, “When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
It’s likely we’ll see something similarly convoluted in Wake Up Dead Man. So far in the Knives Out series, we’ve seen identical twin schemes and stage knives — there’s no telling what this even more complicated third chapter has in store.
