In 2019, Oscar nominated writer-director Rian Johnson and Daniel Craig revitalized the British drawing room murder mystery with the gleeful, star-laden KNIVES OUT (Screening Series 2019), creating their own version of Agatha Christie’s unflappable detective Hercule Poirot with Craig’s brilliant Southerner, Benoit Blanc. The follow-up, GLASS ONION (Fall Focus 2022), focused on a tech-bro billionaire, ratcheting up the humour and evoking Herbert Ross’ cult classic THE LAST OF SHEILA. (It also threw in the added fun of seeing obscenely rich people’s gaudiest stuff get trashed.) WAKE UP DEAD MAN shifts gears again with a relatively sombre look into the tensions between faith and logic.

This time, Johnson riffs on the dark, gothic elements of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue—a seemingly impossible locked-room scenario involving a corpse—while still incorporating many of the series’ signature elements. Set in a small town and focusing on its local church, WAKE UP DEAD MAN is packed with stars, including Josh O’Connor as a the younger cleric to Josh Brolin’s autocratic, abrasive priest, Glenn Close as his right-hand person, plus Kerry Washington, Andrew Scott, Cailee Spaeny, Jeremy Renner (whose likeness had a memorable appearance in GLASS ONION), and Mila Kunis as a local cop who is as determined as Blanc to solve this seemingly insoluble case. And there’s a murder that presents itself as an impossible crime. All that and Craig delivers perhaps his best Blanc yet.

The latest entry in one of the most successful mystery series in recent film history is as strong, inventive, and entertaining as ever.

—Robyn Citizen, Toronto International Film Festival guide