Nothing says it’s holiday season quite like a new installment of Rian Johnson’s delightful Knives Out mystery series. The final trailer for Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery was just released, featuring Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc in all his Southern gentleman detective glory. This time, he’s tackling the strange death of a parish priest in a spookily Gothic small-town setting.
As we’ve previously reported, the original Knives Out was a masterfully plotted, winning mashup of Clue and Murder on the Orient Express—or any number of adaptations of novels by the grande dame of murder mysteries, Agatha Christie—along with other classics like Deathtrap, Gosford Park, and Murder by Death. Craig clearly found Blanc a refreshing counter to the 007 franchise, and he and Johnson soon committed to filming a sequel: 2022’s Glass Onion, inspired particularly by the Christie-based “tropical getaway” whodunnit Evil Under the Sun (1982) and an under-appreciated 1973 gem called The Last of Sheila.
And now we have Wake Up Dead Man. With this franchise, the less one knows going in, the better. But Johnson has assembled yet another winning all-star cast. Josh Brolin plays the victim, the fire-and-brimstone-spewing Monseigneur Jefferson Wicks; Josh O’Connor plays a young priest named Rev. Jud Duplenticy; Glenn Close plays a devout churchgoer named Martha Delacroix, Wick’s loyal helper; Mila Kunis plays local police chief Geraldine Scott; Jeremy Renner plays town doctor Nat Sharp; Kerry Washington plays uptight lawyer Vera Draven; Daryl McCormack plays aspiring politician Cy Draven; Thomas Haden Church plays groundskeeper Samson Holt; Andrew Scott plays bestselling author Lee Ross; and Cailee Spaeny plays Simone Vivane, a disabled former classical cellist.