Josh O’Connor as a Beatific Priest Steals the Spotlight in Wake Up Dead Man
Though we don’t get one every year, people seem to look forward to every installment of Rian Johnson’s Knives Out series, which kicked off in 2019. That first movie introduced the world to Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc, a detective whose manners and Louisiana accent are as smooth as churned butter; in that picture, his job was to solve the mystery of a best-selling crime novelist’s sudden death. Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, released by Netflix in 2022, was somewhat less satisfying, though its Greek island setting allowed for a kind of voyeuristic lavishness—and also made a great backdrop for characters played by the likes of Janelle Monae and Kate Hudson to swan around in floaty-chic getups.
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Now, the powers that be have blessed us with Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, also written and directed by Johnson, in which Josh O’Connor plays a feisty but dedicated priest who, after losing his temper with an uppity deacon, gets reassigned to a new parish in a calm, bucolic upstate New York location. Unfortunately, this tiny, tight-knit congregation happens to be lorded over by a megalomaniac monsignor, Josh Brolin’s Jefferson Wicks. Wicks is a fire-and-brimstone hothead with an iron grip on his followers, who include a crackpot sci-fi writer (Andrew Scott), a faithful longtime servant and family friend who will do anything to protect her boss (Glenn Close), and a brainy, driven lawyer who nonetheless seems to have fallen into Wick’s controlling grip (Kerry Washington). Wicks ends up dead, stabbed in the back with a sinister-looking thingamabob. Who on God’s Green Earth might have done such a thing? The newcomer, O’Connor’s Father Jud Duplenticy, a former boxer who freely admits to once having killed a man out of pure rage, is eyed suspiciously.
The plot of Wake Up Dead Man is fatally cluttered, and the story winds up in a blur of exposition that’s not particularly clever. What’s more, the ensemble of actors here is large: it also includes Cailee Spaeny as a cellist whose career has been derailed by a chronic nerve disorder, Jeremy Renner as a not-very-successful doctor pining for the wife who’s just skipped out on him, and the church’s longtime groundskeeper (Thomas Haden Church), who seems more checked out than he is devoted. With so many actors milling around, not everyone gets enough to do.
But as with the previous two Knives Out installments, the conclusion is almost beside the point. It’s the getting there that matters, and the twisty road of Wake Up Dead Man is dotted with offhanded jokes and one-liners that are occasionally extremely witty. The actors’ timing is everything. At one point Father Jud and Monsignor Wick find themselves cleaning up the mausoleum of Wick’s grandfather; it has been adorned with phallic graffiti by local troublemakers, who aren’t particularly happy with the younger Wick’s style of preaching. Close’s straitlaced Wick family loyalist Martha stops by to express her disapproval. Surveying this crude assemblage of penises Sharpie’d on marble, she sputters, “It makes me sick, these kids putting rocket ships all over his sacred resting place!”
But O’Connor is the chief reason to watch Wake Up Dead Man. Craig’s Blanc, with his Foghorn-Leghorn drawl, steps up at key moments to expound on his theories of who’s responsible for this latest murder—he deems it an “impossible crime,” and for a while, it stumps him. But O’Connor quietly steals the spotlight even so. His Father Jud has enough complexity to make you wonder if maybe he did kill the exceedingly unsavory Wick. We get a glimpse of a neck tattoo peeking from beneath his clerical collar, providing a hint of his bad-boy past. When he sits down to hear Wick’s routine confession (it’s mostly a litany of how many times Wick has masturbated in the past week or two), he blushes and stammers just enough to make you wonder if he isn’t really just a repressed loony himself. But in other moments, he’s positively beatific: as part of the murder investigation, he ends up in conversation with a local contractor, offering empathetic guidance as she pours out a painful story about her strained relationship with her dying mother. Over and over again, his explosive past notwithstanding, Father Jud radiates the kind of sunshiny grace that makes you believe heavenly forgiveness is possible.
He also gets the movie’s best lines, and serves them up delectably. When Blanc surveys a list of the murder mysteries Wick’s followers have been reading in the church book club—it includes Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue and Agatha Christie’s The Murder at the Vicarage—he demands to know who chose such incendiary material. Father Jud is ready with the answer. “Oprah,” he says, his face beaming with the innocence of an angel. It’s a dumb joke, but O’Connor makes it laugh-out-loud funny. In a movie that’s in most ways just more Knives Out business as usual, he’s a miracle worker.