Watching Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, the third film in the Knives Out detective series, it’s hard to escape the notion that writer-director Rian Johnson is playing his career on hard mode. The series’ previous movies, Knives Out and Glass Onion, wrap murder mysteries around pointed messages about class elitism, wealth inequity, and the myth of America’s meritocracy. Similarly, Wake Up Dead Man isn’t just a satisfyingly complicated, twist-packed murder mystery — it’s a potentially polarizing story about faith in God, the real value of religion, and the threatening power a church leader can have over a community.
Johnson’s movie didn’t have to be nearly this emotionally rich or conceptually challenging, any more than his Star Wars movie The Last Jedi had to challenge the entire history of the Jedi order, or his first movie, Brick, had to deliriously complicate the noir genre by crossbreeding it with a high-school drama. Somewhere out there in the ether is the alternate-universe pure-entertainment version of Wake Up Dead Man, which rounds up the same impressive cast (including Daniel Craig, Glenn Close, Mila Kunis, Kerry Washington, Jeremy Renner, and Challengers’ Josh O’Connor) and hits the same grabby murder-mystery beats without grappling with such dangerous topics.
But Johnson tells Polygon that making ambitious movies — and making Knives Out 3 in particular a personal, potentially controversial project — was his way of staying interested not just in the series, but in filmmaking in general.
“Increasingly, as I get older, it would be much harder to make movies if I didn’t have something like that to engage with, if I didn’t have something that was scary,” he says. “Because it’s a tightrope, I’m not sure I can get across without falling. I feel like, increasingly, I want more of that. And also, as a moviegoer, I want more of that in the movies I go see.”
Johnson says he’s become “increasingly impatient” with movies that don’t challenge him, both as a viewer and as a director.
“I still enjoy going to movies that just entertain me,” he says. “But the reality is, what I’m really looking for, true entertainment right now, is something that engages me. We can all get just mindless entertainment scrolling through our phones all day long. So I find myself going to the movies to actually have something engage me on a deeper level.”
Johnson says Wake Up Dead Man didn’t start with any concept of how its locked-door mystery might work: The project came from wanting to write about religion.
“It started with the idea of faith,” he says. “Glass Onion was exactly what we wanted to make. I’m very proud of it, I had a great time making it. But it was a big, boisterous, broad comedic mystery. With this one, I thought it would be really fun to ground it and to dig into something very personal for myself. Christianity and my faith are a big part of my past, and have echoes all the way into my present. It felt like there was no bigger or more personal thing for me to try and dig into, and see if I could do it in a way that wasn’t didactic or finger-wagging.”
Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery opens in limited theatrical release on Nov. 25 before streaming on Netflix on Dec. 12. Check the movie’s website for a list of participating theaters.
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Author: 360 Technology Group
