‘Knives Out’ and Time for Forgiveness
Plus: How the ‘Knives Out’ franchise explains Netflix’s WB play.
RIAN JOHNSON’S FIRST TWO Knives Out films are almost impossibly rooted in their own moments.
Benoit Blanc’s (Daniel Craig) initial outing is as 2019 a movie as exists, just a mishmash of clod-like conservatives and woo-woo progressive hypocrites and snide references to Hamilton, the ultimate symbol of Obama-era liberalism. The hero was a kindhearted immigrant whose mother was at risk of deportation; the villains, the epitome of white privilege. It was like a celluloid manifestation of “allyship.” But the overbearing ideological markers didn’t overwhelm the film because Johnson had crafted a clockwork-tight script, a deft combination of “whodunit” and “howcatchem” that kept audiences who thought they had it figured out guessing until the closing moments.
In 2022, Benoit Blanc returned in Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery. And like its predecessor, it too is a time capsule upon rewatch three years later: Shot in the midst of COVID and focused on a tech mogul and his moronic hangers-on (including, naturally, a manosphere podcaster and a sweatpants entrepreneur canceled for dropping ethnic slurs), the mystery at the heart of the picture was sloppier and the resolution less satisfying because it boiled down to Blanc yelling “You’re dumb” at the Elon Musk stand-in played by Edward Norton. This may have been emotionally satisfying for some, but intellectually it was fairly stultifying.
And now, three years later, Johnson and Craig are back with Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery. Suffused with Catholic ideas about guilt and penance, Wake Up Dead Man is an interesting counterpoint to the first two films. Yes, yes: the ideological signifiers are all still there. The worst characters are the most likely to code as rightwing doofuses; the kindest characters more likely to code as progressive. But for the first time in the series, Johnson offers up something like forgiveness—absolution, if you will—to those willing to ask for it.
The film opens with a long flashback, Rev. Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor) writing a letter to Blanc explaining precisely how he has come to be the primary suspect in the murder of Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin). Very long story short: O’Connor’s an outsider to this parish and Wicks is much beloved—at least, by his core group of worshipers, which is shrinking by the day. Duplenticy has been sent to Wicks to help him rekindle faith in the broader community, but his open arms are no match for Wicks’s punchiness. And there are so many secrets being hidden by everyone involved that, naturally, everyone’s a suspect.
I shan’t go into the mystery at the heart of the film or discuss the way it is unraveled, save to say that it is a.) tighter than the previous entry in the series and b.) set up to pay off with one of Blanc’s patented stemwinder explainers. But Blanc withholds his showy checkmate at the last moment, understanding, even as an atheist, that absolution can only come from confession and contrition. You can reveal the guilty but you cannot redeem them; that’s a choice they have to make for themselves.
Like the previous Knives Out films, this picture is a cavalcade of stars, with Oscar nominees like Glenn Close, Jeremy Renner, Jeffrey Wright, and Thomas Haden Church joining A-Listers like Mila Kunis and Kerry Washington along with relatively fresh faces like Andrew Scott and Cailee Spaeny. It’s just fun watching such top-of-the-line talent chew on Johnson’s occasionally hammy dialogue.
It’s also a remarkably good-looking movie. Cinematographer Steve Yedlin, who has worked with Johnson since his remarkable 2005 debut feature, Brick, has really outdone himself with this movie, playing with light and shadow, sunbeams through stained-glass windows, strobe lighting during a chaotic fight sequence, and more. There’s one moment where a character is backlit by a giant blood moon, and it’s framed and shot in such a way that despite knowing this has to be some sort of special-effects trickery, your mind can’t quite process what’s been done, what’s been monkeyed with. So you just accept the gothic grandeur of it. I didn’t love how Glass Onion looked—too much CGI architecture—but this movie calls to mind the initial outing’s effort to shoot the grand old house that serves as the primary set with a sort of intricate, elevated seediness, along with a return to some of the fun camera-play that Johnson has shed a little over the years.
Elevated seediness: that is the heart of these, or really any, murder mysteries, from Edgar to Agatha to Gillian. They are, all of them, tawdry affairs, murders resulting from greed, or lust, or maybe a little of both. But Johnson, for the first time, seems to have some sympathy for his devil, some empathy for their missteps. And that lends Wake Up Dead Man a tragic air that has been previously lacking in the series.
BACK IN 2021, NETFLIX PAID $469 million for the right to produce and own two sequels to Knives Out. Wake Up Dead Man is the second of them; it hits the service today after a perfunctory run in a couple of hundred theaters that most people in the country weren’t aware of because Netflix doesn’t really advertise these things. It will, like its predecessor, do boffo numbers for the streamer, the Christmas season being the perfect time to gather the family round the television and have everyone shut up for two blessed hours.
I mention this because Netflix is in the news for making another astronomical purchase: $82.7 billion or so for Warner Bros., its film library, its streaming service, and other sundry assets. (I discussed with Vulture’s Nicholas Quah just how many weird little things—like the Harry Potter portions of the Universal theme parks—Netflix will have its fingers in if the deal goes through on the podcast this week, I hope you give it a listen.) And I feel like some of the lessons from Knives Out are instructive here.
The best-case scenario for people who love movie theaters is the one laid out by the Entertainment Strategy Guy here, namely that Netflix will decide that picking up a studio with one of the best distribution arms in the world will give them an excuse to fundamentally alter their own streaming-first business strategy. The idea here being that there’s simply too much money in play to scrap theatrical releases—which have generated more than $1.85 billion in revenue for Warner Brothers alone this year—entirely. Netflix will have debt to pay down, this is money they can use to pay down that debt, et voila: Theaters are saved, at least for now.
Maybe! But I look at Knives Out and I wonder. Because that deal only makes sense through one lens: depriving rival studios and movie theaters a nearly guaranteed hit. You don’t pay $235 million for the right to produce a sequel to a movie that cost $40 million because you think it’s going to generate 8 million new subscribers. You do it to chop a leg out of the theatrical ecosystem. Just as Netflix has done by overpaying for awards season fare. Just as Netflix has done by overpaying action stars like Dwayne Johnson and Ryan Reynolds. Just as Netflix has done by overpaying for comedy names like Adam Sandler.
Taking Warner Bros. off the table doesn’t just chop a leg out from under theatrical: It cleaves the whole thing. Here’s hoping that someone at the FCC understands this well enough to force some sort of theatrical guarantees as a condition for letting this deal go through.
"Wake Up Dead Man" I think might be the best of the "Knives Out" films. I caught it at the Alamo a couple of weeks ago and it really is just a gorgeous, propulsive film. And it helps Daniel Craig is having the time of his life mealy-mouthing a Cajun accent
Thank you for hyour insight into the film and the industry. Peter G. Stern