Early on in Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) uncovers the ingredients of his latest murder case written on a piece of paper: a laundry list of literary classics, among them John Dickson Carr’s The Hollow Man, Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, and Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue. It’s a refreshing set of references to see – one that speaks to the stylistic breadth of the genre that’s so often forgotten. Christie is the heart of it, but not its totality.
Writer-director Rian Johnson gets it. It’s what’s made his Knives Out series feel like a fathomless well of grey matter entertainment. Knives Out, the original, was a classic, mahogany-panelled Christie riff; Glass Onion, its sequel, was a sunbaked, deluxe spin on The Last of Sheila (1973). Now Wake Up Dead Man offers Gothic flair, suitable for a year that’s already featured adaptations of Nosferatu and Frankenstein, with Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights on the horizon.
