wake up dead man (2025)
Dec. 22nd, 2025 05:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
portico When I worked at a comic shop, a regular told me one day that he had seen The Phantom Menace 5 times in the cinema. He adored star wars, so the thought that a star wars movie might be bad was untenable. Surely the problem must be with him! So he went back again, and again, and again...until presumably it left the theaters or someone in his life intervened. That's how I felt watching Wake Up Dead Man.
I saw this for the first time on Thanksgiving Day. Went in feeling anxious and with impossibly high expectations and left practically unhinged with disappointment. Couldn't talk about it. Normal reaction to a movie. Sat with that for a while and then went and saw it once again, determined to take it on its own merits. Ultimately I still don't think it works! Here is my effort at putting down why.
I loved Knives Out and Glass Onion. I thought they were loving riffs on a genre I know as well as I know myself, from a lifetime spent reading and watching it. They worked for me in both visuals and plot. They were also about rich people being terrible, which is frequently a core tenet of the ensemble murder mystery, both as it appears in literature and film. Knives Out is doing something with Sleuth, with Poirot, with the concept of the gentleman sleuth. Glass Onion moves the setting out of the family home and into a social circle a la The Last of Sheila and Evil Under the Sun. Wake Up Dead Man had me on the back foot from the start, because what it looks like is an English village priest mystery (an genre in and of itself), but in upstate New York and deeply, terribly American.
My main complaints about the film were these: too long and too blunt.
As much as I loved Josh O'Connor's performance as Father Jud (AND BELIEVE ME I DID), I didn't think we needed quite so much time with him before Benoit Blanc entered stage left. There's a trend that I've noticed in contemporary mystery tv where a person is not allowed to miss something. A character notices a clue, you, the viewer, notice the noticing, and then 20 minutes later the clue becomes relevant and the show gives you a helpful little flashback to a thing that you literally just saw. It makes me scream from the comfort of my living room sofa and just about everyone does it now. I prefer mysteries that don't hold my hand, and previously that was a thing I enjoyed a lot about the Benoit Blanc pictures. There were a few moments in this film when they lingered long enough on a clue that I felt like the movie was waiting for everyone to look up from their phones and notice. Which certainly didn't help with the length issue.
I wanted more subtlety from the mystery, and from the film's politics. Possibly this is because I just watched Murder Before Evensong, a miniseries set in the 1980s about an Anglican canon who is solving mysteries while also following his heart in terms of his faith (he comes under fire from his church for visiting with AIDS patients). The political actors in this one felt more to me like twitter talking heads (whyyyyyyy did they waste Andrew Scott in this role), and the Trumpness was just a lot! I think you could have turned down the saturation and it would have still worked. You could also have set it in the UK I think! Which would have made my brain a lot happier since it spent the runtime insisting that everything I was seeing was in England (AND WAS CORRECT). (Also I'm sorry everyone but I thought the light thing was silly!!)
The thing I loved best about this movie was I think the thing that everyone loved best: Father Jud and Benoit Blanc. Both actors were excellent, they had great chemistry, and I did enjoy the faith discussions.skygiants pointed out that they appreciated that both were allowed to have valid points of view and that neither "won" their conversations re: the existence of god. I also adored Bridget Everett as Louise and that whole scene. Perfect casting, perfect moment. Loved the Chekov's Lazarus door, loved the knife-throwing robot, loved Thomas Haden Church, loved Glenn Close's costuming and the gothic trappings of it all. Loved the fabergé mention for something that's not an egg. (Did they just do giant jewels?)
But. I dunno man! I really wanted to love this movie. I spent a week hurt that I didn't, because Knives Out and Glass Onion had worked so well for me that I was like This Guy Gets It and I had a rough fall and the movie by the guy that gets it was supposed fix everything and it didn't but that's not on him. I think there was a solid, sharp, fun movie buried in this one that I would have really loved. If it had also not tried to gaslight me about being in New York.
I saw this for the first time on Thanksgiving Day. Went in feeling anxious and with impossibly high expectations and left practically unhinged with disappointment. Couldn't talk about it. Normal reaction to a movie. Sat with that for a while and then went and saw it once again, determined to take it on its own merits. Ultimately I still don't think it works! Here is my effort at putting down why.
I loved Knives Out and Glass Onion. I thought they were loving riffs on a genre I know as well as I know myself, from a lifetime spent reading and watching it. They worked for me in both visuals and plot. They were also about rich people being terrible, which is frequently a core tenet of the ensemble murder mystery, both as it appears in literature and film. Knives Out is doing something with Sleuth, with Poirot, with the concept of the gentleman sleuth. Glass Onion moves the setting out of the family home and into a social circle a la The Last of Sheila and Evil Under the Sun. Wake Up Dead Man had me on the back foot from the start, because what it looks like is an English village priest mystery (an genre in and of itself), but in upstate New York and deeply, terribly American.
My main complaints about the film were these: too long and too blunt.
As much as I loved Josh O'Connor's performance as Father Jud (AND BELIEVE ME I DID), I didn't think we needed quite so much time with him before Benoit Blanc entered stage left. There's a trend that I've noticed in contemporary mystery tv where a person is not allowed to miss something. A character notices a clue, you, the viewer, notice the noticing, and then 20 minutes later the clue becomes relevant and the show gives you a helpful little flashback to a thing that you literally just saw. It makes me scream from the comfort of my living room sofa and just about everyone does it now. I prefer mysteries that don't hold my hand, and previously that was a thing I enjoyed a lot about the Benoit Blanc pictures. There were a few moments in this film when they lingered long enough on a clue that I felt like the movie was waiting for everyone to look up from their phones and notice. Which certainly didn't help with the length issue.
I wanted more subtlety from the mystery, and from the film's politics. Possibly this is because I just watched Murder Before Evensong, a miniseries set in the 1980s about an Anglican canon who is solving mysteries while also following his heart in terms of his faith (he comes under fire from his church for visiting with AIDS patients). The political actors in this one felt more to me like twitter talking heads (whyyyyyyy did they waste Andrew Scott in this role), and the Trumpness was just a lot! I think you could have turned down the saturation and it would have still worked. You could also have set it in the UK I think! Which would have made my brain a lot happier since it spent the runtime insisting that everything I was seeing was in England (AND WAS CORRECT). (Also I'm sorry everyone but I thought the light thing was silly!!)
The thing I loved best about this movie was I think the thing that everyone loved best: Father Jud and Benoit Blanc. Both actors were excellent, they had great chemistry, and I did enjoy the faith discussions.
skygiants pointed out that they appreciated that both were allowed to have valid points of view and that neither "won" their conversations re: the existence of god. I also adored Bridget Everett as Louise and that whole scene. Perfect casting, perfect moment. Loved the Chekov's Lazarus door, loved the knife-throwing robot, loved Thomas Haden Church, loved Glenn Close's costuming and the gothic trappings of it all. Loved the fabergé mention for something that's not an egg. (Did they just do giant jewels?)But. I dunno man! I really wanted to love this movie. I spent a week hurt that I didn't, because Knives Out and Glass Onion had worked so well for me that I was like This Guy Gets It and I had a rough fall and the movie by the guy that gets it was supposed fix everything and it didn't but that's not on him. I think there was a solid, sharp, fun movie buried in this one that I would have really loved. If it had also not tried to gaslight me about being in New York.