Josh O’Connor Takes Wake Up Dead Man to Church

Like any good mystery series, the Benoit Blanc movies know the value of repetition. You could call it a formula if you felt like knocking this series of films from writer-director Rian Johnson, which kicked off with Knives Out in 2019 and continued with Glass Onion in 2022. As those two films did, Johnson’s latest, Wake Up Dead Man, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival to this year’s most rabid crowds so far. Once again, Johnson has gathered together an all-star cast — this group includes Glenn Close, Andrew Scott, Kerry Washington, Jeremy Renner, and Josh Brolin — to set up the pins so that Daniel Craig’s dapper Southern detective can knock ’em all down. But while Wake Up Dead Man is another murder mystery, the most compelling crime in the film occurs in plain sight, as Josh O’Connor outright steals the film out from under Benoit Blanc, and he does it dressed in the vestments of a Catholic priest.

O’Connor plays Reverend Jud Duplenticy, a young priest seeking his own salvation. He gets sent to a small upstate New York church to assist Monsignor Wicks (Josh Brolin), a kind of Catholic Colonel Kurtz — aggressive and territorial and half-mad. O’Connor plays his half of the power struggle between the two priests initially as light comedy; the English actor (playing American again, as he did in Challengers) is downright nebbishy in moments. He’s a great fit for Johnson’s tendency to puncture the moment with comic relief, which is kind of infuriating. No one that handsome should also get to have good comic timing.

But it’s in the film’s surprising degree of sincerity that O’Connor makes himself invaluable. Wake Up Dead Man is the most earnest (and least comedic) of the three Blanc films. And it’s sincere about faith, of all things, and politics, too. My guess is that will occupy a great deal of the reaction to this movie. If Knives Out and Glass Onion were sideswipes at the anti-immigrant right and Silicon Valley fascists, respectively, Wake Up Dead Man is Rian Johnson taking dead aim at Trump and his band of hard-liners. The all-star cast mostly plays Wicks’ parishioners, each with their own little set of personal foibles that at any moment could become a motive to kill. Because yes, there is eventually a murder, and Blanc turns up in town full of theories and brio.

But this is Father Jud’s movie. We get a third of the way into it before Blanc arrives, and by then, O’Connor has already more than capably put the film on his shoulders. An idealistic priest with a profound belief in the Church’s power to save souls could be a tough sell for another actor, but O’Connor capably lands every beat — he’s awfully formidable for a pretty boy, and awfully sympathetic for a priest. There’s a darkness on the periphery of his performance, too. No man of such intense religious faith can ever be ruled out as a killer, after all.

Daniel Craig was deservedly lauded for the first two Blanc films, and he’s no less winning in this one. But with Wake Up Dead Man as interested in salvation as it is in its whodunit yarn, Josh O’Connor ends up as the film’s MVP: Most Valuable… Priest. (So dumb.)

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