Wake Up Dead Man

CW: Spoilers for the first two Knives Out films, mild spoiler for the latest.

The first two Knives Out movies both rely on mid-story reveals that recontextualize the story. In Knives Out, the kindly nurse is revealed to have accidentally poisoned her charge, who stages a suicide to protect her; the movie switches from a detective story to a comedy, and then back into a detective story at the end. In Glass Onion, we have no idea who invited Benoit Blanc to this island or what the mystery even is, until halfway through we learn that one of the characters is being impersonated by her identical twin sister, who is helping Blanc investigate her sister’s murder.

I expected Wake Up Dead Man to have a similar twist, and … it doesn’t. It’s the most straight-forward of the movies so far. We have a murder and a group of suspects, and it stays a detective movie the whole way through. Wild.

There is a character with a secret revealed at the very end of the film, but it doesn’t change our understanding of the story—it deepens it.

Anyway. Good movie. I found the first half an hour a little slow, but after Blanc showed up, it was great.