When I was in my early teens, I was both a devout churchgoer and an avid reader of mysteries. One of my favorite writers was P.D. James, whose Anglican faith informed her fiction in subtle ways. For James, the plotting and solving of murder was a grisly yet profoundly moral undertaking. A detective story, she wrote, "confirms our hope that, despite some evidence to the contrary, we live in a beneficent and moral universe in which problems can be solved by rational means."
The new movie Wake Up Dead Man, Rian Johnson's latest whodunit after Knives Out and Glass Onion, is too funny and slyly over-the-top to feel like a P.D. James story; to my knowledge, James never incorporated body-dissolving acid or the old poisoned-beverage switcheroo trick. But in his own crafty way, Johnson is also using mystery conventions to open up a spiritual inquiry.
The story takes place in and around a Catholic church at a small town in upstate New York, where a junior priest named Jud Duplenticy, played by a terrific Josh O'Connor, has been assigned to serve. Unfortunately, he's forced to work under Monsignor Jefferson Wicks, whom Josh Brolin plays as an angry fundamentalist firebrand, spewing hatred and contempt for gay people, single moms and the entire hell-bound secular world.
Although Wicks' behavior has reduced church attendance, he's surrounded himself with a small group of loyalists. The most devoted is Martha, who keeps the church running; she's played by an amusingly nosy Glenn Close. There's also Kerry Washington as a sharp-witted attorney and Jeremy Renner as a sad-sack alcoholic doctor. Cailee Spaeny plays a famous cellist who donates large sums to the church, in hopes that God will heal her chronic pain. Two characters feel like sharp, cynical jabs at American conservatism: One is a formerly liberal writer, played by Andrew Scott, who's since drifted rightward. The other is a failed young Republican politician turned aspiring YouTuber, played by Daryl McCormack.
With the best of intentions, Jud tries hard to break Wicks' hold on his flock and lead them into deeper faith in God. But he succeeds only in making an even greater enemy of the monsignor. And when Wicks is fatally stabbed in the church — and on Good Friday, no less — suspicion immediately falls on Jud. But Jud insists that he's innocent, and before long, the private investigator Benoit Blanc, played once again by Daniel Craig with a courtly Southern drawl, comes knocking.
Blanc believes that Jud is innocent and enlists him to help solve the murder, which won't be easy. Wicks is the victim of what is known in detective fiction as an impossible crime, one that seems to defy rational explanation. At one point, Blanc gives Jud and the audience a crash course in the work of John Dickson Carr, the undisputed master of the impossible-crime novel. Since Carr is another of my favorite writers, Johnson's next-level genre geekery almost had me levitating out of my seat.
Wake Up Dead Man may not be the best movie I've seen this year, but in some ways — and I don't often say this kind of thing — it feels like the movie that was made most for me. That goes for its ideas as well as its genre trappings. Just as the first two Knives Out movies skewered racism, classism, billionaires and tech bros, Wake Up Dead Man takes sharp aim at what it sees as the intolerance and insularity of the Christian right. The political jabs aren't always subtle, and sometimes, the petty, ill-tempered parishioners sound too alike in their strident bickering. But that just makes Father Jud all the more appealing a character, as he sets out to humbly yet radically love his community.
Given how good O'Connor has been lately, in movies like Challengers and The Mastermind, it's saying a lot that this is one of his best performances — and one that elevates this snarky, satirical murder farce to a genuinely contemplative plane. Even as tensions mount — there's more than one victim, and possibly more than one killer — the movie becomes a kind of theological debate, pitting Jud the earnest believer against Blanc the fierce skeptic. Who emerges the winner? Let's just say that with a puzzle as satisfyingly constructed as Wake Up Dead Man, God really is in the details.
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