[COLUMN] Wake Up Dead Man is a Murder Mystery About the Power of Confession | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Note: This piece contains spoilers for Wake Up Dead Man, Rian Johnson’s third Knives Out movie, which is now streaming on Netflix. It reveals the identity of the murderer(s) among other details. Also spoilers for Knives Out and Glass Onion. So proceed with care.

To quote an old truism, confession is good for the soul. It is also central to Wake Up Dead Man, the third entry in Rian Johnson’s Knives Out series of murder mysteries.

When young Reverend Jud Duplenticy (Josh O'Connor) arrives in the parish of Chimney Rock in upstate New York, one of the first things that Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin) has the new arrival do is to take his confession. At the film’s climax, it is revealed that the events of the plot were all spurred into motion by a confession that faithful parishioner Martha Delacroix (Glenn Close) made to Wicks, revealing crucial information about a hidden fortune.

Then there’s the finale. Most of these detective stories build to a climactic set piece in which the gentleman sleuth takes focus to lay out the narrative of the case, to explain what really happened and to identify the guilty party. These extended monologues are a great showcase for actors and directors, lending these mysteries a sense of catharsis and reassurance. The guilty will be identified, the wicked will be punished, and the hero will stand on a stage and point an accusing finger.

Both Knives Out and Glass Onion build to a sequence like this, as private investigator Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) assembles the facts of the case and fills in the gaps in the established narrative. These sequences are part of the pleasure of the classic detective story, something that Blanc acknowledges. “I am incapable of not solving a crime,” he boasts to Duplenticy. “That moment of checkmate, when I take the stage and unravel my opponent’s web… Well, you’ll see. It’s fun!”

So it feels pointed that Wake Up Dead Man denies Blanc and the audience that moment of catharsis. Rather, Blanc denies himself that opportunity. At the end of the film, standing before the authorities and the assembled suspects, Blanc seems to falter. “I cannot solve this case,” he admits to the crowd from the top of the church. Asked to clarify whether that means that the case – a locked room resurrection mystery – is unsolvable, he repeats, “I’m saying that I cannot solve this case.”

The truth is that Blanc is waiting for the guilt party to confess of their own free will. The crowd dissipates. The news assembles outside. There is certainty that Jud will be arrested for the murders of at least one of the three dead bodies that have accrued in the parish over the weekend: Monsignor Wicks, Doctor Nat Sharp (Jeremy Renner) and caretaker Samson Holt (Thomas Haden Church). Witnessing this moment of grace, Martha steps forward and confesses her guilt.

It is interesting, and is in some ways a deconstruction of the classic murder mystery format. Of course, there is a certain defensiveness that inevitably pops up in discussions of deconstruction, as if the act of interrogating a genre or a framework is blasphemy or heresy. In truth, deconstruction is often an act of love, an expression of how deeply a creator has thought about their subject, and their desire to see how far it can be pushed and how its components can be taken apart and reassembled.

Johnson clearly loves the classic murder mystery. His Knives Out trilogy are great examples of the form. However, they are not quite as reverential and classical in their sensibilities as Kenneth Branagh’s recent Poirot trilogy. They are very modern films, in the same way that Agatha Christie wrote very modern books. More broadly, Johnson’s Knives Out films are actively engaged with the question of what a murder mystery even is and the purpose that it serves.

Blanc is very pointedly not a classical detective. Glass Onion makes a repeated point of stressing how bad Blanc is at solving mysteries that are simple games or logic puzzles. He loses at Among Us and has no passion for Clue. Fittingly, he doesn’t really deal with conventional cases. Knives Out, for example, begins with what looks like the suicide of mystery author Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer), that is after a series of convoluted twists eventually revealed to be… a suicide.

In Glass Onion, Blanc spends most of the movie trying desperately to figure out which one of the acolytes of tech billionaire Miles Bron (Edward Norton) would be rash enough to murder his former business partner Andi Brand (Janelle Monáe), only for the film to build to the revelation that it was Bron himself. For all the twists and turns within the narratives, the solutions to Knives Out and Glass Onion are both ultimately self-evident.

Johnson’s Knives Out films are not logic puzzles or mystery boxes, something that the writer and director signposts at the start of Glass Onion by juxtaposing an extended sequence of the invitees to Bron’s island solving an elaborate mystery box that he prepared, only to cut that against a scene of Andi’s identical twin sister Helen (also Monáe) smashing through the box with a hammer. It is possible to get distracted by the puzzle elements, and miss what rests at the center.

This is, to a certain extent, Blanc’s arc in each of the three movies. In Knives Out, Blanc repeatedly stresses the value of truth and fact in the work that he does. “Be it cruel or comforting, this machine unerringly arrives at the truth,” Blanc tells Marta Cabrera (Ana de Armas), Harlan’s loyal nurse. “That’s what it does.” In Wake Up Dead Man, Duplenticy responds to Blanc’s criticism of faith as nothing but a story by arguing that it’s possible for a story to point to a deeper, more profound truth.

In both Knives Out and Glass Onion, there is a clear tension between what is factual and what is true, and the challenges that a decent man like Blanc must face in navigating that distinction. Harlan took his own life, but only after a series of accidents and missteps engineered by his grandson Ransom (Chris Evans). As Ransom manipulates Marta to implicate her, Blanc has to actively involve himself in the case and provide a counterweight. He is not merely an observer, but a participant.

Something similar happens in Glass Onion, a movie that gleefully shreds through a lot of the core “rules” of the classic murder mystery. It involves identical twins, a big “no-no” in murder mysteries. It conceals the identity of the victim until almost halfway through its runtime. Blanc spends the first half of the movie misrepresenting himself not only to Bron, but to the audience. There is even a superfluous character, Derol (Noah Segan), who just wanders through the movie, never questioned.

At the climax of Glass Onion, Blanc confronts the limits of his power as the protagonist of a murder mystery. He has figured out that Bron murdered Andi, but he has no material proof and Bron has enough leverage that he can blackmail the witnesses to his confession. “Blanc,” Helen pleads, “I need you to do something.” Blanc sighs, “I’m sorry, Helen. I gave you the truth. This is where my jurisdiction ends. I have to answer to the police, the courts, the system.”

This is central to how the Knives Out films understand Blanc as a gentleman detective, caught between what is legal and what is just. “Damned if I don’t get more tired every day,” he admits at one point in Knives Out. “Tired of what I do. Following arcs like lobbed rocks, the inevitability of truth. But the complexity and the gray lie not in the truth but what you do with the truth once you have it.” What good is knowing the truth if it doesn’t make things right?

“The job of the detective is to restore the state of grace in which the aesthetic and the ethical are as one,” wrote literary critic W.H. Auden in 1948. “The phantasy, then, which the detective story addict indulges is the phantasy of being restored to the Garden of Eden, to a state of innocence, where he may know love as love and not as the law. The driving force behind this daydream is the feeling of guilt, the cause of which is unknown to the dreamer.”

Johnson is one of the great modern filmmakers, in large part because he is a filmmaker engaged with the modern world. In particular, the Knives Out trilogy feels like a set of murder mysteries composed for this current moment. They are murder mysteries for “the post-truth age.” They are about the limitations of truth as a source of resolution. The past decade has perhaps demonstrated that truth doesn’t mean as much as it used to.

Over the past decade, there have been many moments like the climax of a detective story, many opportunities to righteously point the finger at the guilty party and implicate them in massive corruption, abuses of power and even more corporeal crimes. These facts have been laid bare and presented, time and time again, over the past decade. They have changed nothing. Identifying the guilty party had done little to restore a state of grace to a fallen land.

Knives Out and Glass Onion met that realization with righteous anger and indignation. In Knives Out, Blanc vents his frustration with how the Thrombey family treated Harlan and Marta, describing them as “a pack of vultures at the feast! Knives out, beaks bloody!” In Glass Onion, Blanc spurs Helen on to burn down Bron’s luxury island mansion, allowing her a moment of catharsis and relief, which inspires Bron’s lackeys to find their own moral courage.

However, at this point, perhaps anger is exhausted. It seems to have accomplished little. Wake Up Dead Man goes further, suggesting that anger is the weapon of the enemy, the spur that Monsignor Wicks uses to keep his followers in line and to bind them closer to him. It’s a very mature argument, and one that feels like a clear evolution of the themes of the franchise, even if it feels somewhat naïve and optimistic. Wake Up Dead Man places its faith in grace, in the power of confession.

Over the course of the film, Duplenticy grows frustrated with Blanc’s aggressive fixation on cracking the case,  which he describes as “the holy grail” and “the stuff of detective fiction.” Duplenticy protests that he has had enough of Blanc’s games. “This is not a game,” Blanc counters. “It is a game!” Duplenticy insists. “Solving it, winning it, getting your big checkmate moment!” Wake Up Dead Man asks what does that actually accomplish, beyond the feeling of satisfaction?

At the end of the film, once he’s put all the pieces together, Blanc graciously steps aside and gives Delacroix space to confess. He credits Duplenticy for inspiring him. “His example to have grace,” Blanc explains. “Grace for my enemy. Grace for the broken. Grace for those who deserve it the least, but need it the most: for the guilty.” Blanc seems to believe that it is only through confession that the community can come together and be truly healed.

To be fair to Wake Up Dead Man, the film concedes that confession can be used as a weapon. It is not enough to confess, confession must be done with a pure heart. Monsignor Wicks uses the sacrament of confession as a way to humiliate Duplenticy, burdening him with masturbation fantasies. Provoked by Duplecticy, Delacroix confesses the location of a lost fortune to Wicks “with defiant pride”, a revelation that sets in motion the chaos that follows. Confession can be dangerous.

There is a warm humanism at the heart of Wake Up Dead Man. The film believes that the guilty can confess, and that through confession the community might be healed. In some ways, this is just as much of a fantasy as the belief that constructing watertight cases and pointing the right finger will redeem a broken system. There is, after all, no indication that any of the guilty at this moment have any desire to confess their sins or any hope to be absolved. To wait on such a confession is a luxury.

Then again, it wouldn’t be faith if it were something that could be easily proven. If nothing else, Wake Up Dead Man understands the power of a good story.