"The lights went down precisely at 6 pm, the designated starting hour for Rian Johnson's Wake Up Dead Man, and people began murmuring in pleasant surprise: at premium TIFF screenings where a starry cast is the main attraction, kick-off time is understood to be more of a loose suggestion than an actuality you can make plans around. Director of Programming and Platform Lead Robyn Citizen briskly thanked the sponsors and brought out Johnson; he worked the room and had his intro done in 2.5 minutes."
"On my personal Benoit Blanc scale, Dead Man is better than Knives Out but less satisfying than Glass Onion. This time the genre is gothic, a new framework following what Johnson described in his intro as the "cozy family mystery" of the first film and the "vacation mystery" of the second. Within that gothic container, Dead Man is also a classic locked-room puzzle,"
"The best scene has Blanc holding court while iterating the three possibilities of how a locked-room mystery might be solved, directly citing Carr's The Hollow Man as a reference text. If you are going to spend a decent amount of Netflix's money for the third film in a franchise you've created because stand-alone films aren't IP-y enough, this kind of scholasticism is the way to make the most of it."
Lights dimmed promptly at 6 pm for the Wake Up Dead Man screening at TIFF, with program leadership briefly introducing Rian Johnson and the film starting soon after. The film ranks between Knives Out and Glass Onion on a personal Benoit Blanc scale and adopts a gothic genre while functioning as a classic locked-room puzzle. A church group reading list in the film cites Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr. Benoit Blanc explicates three traditional solutions to locked-room mysteries, and the film leverages scholastic mystery elements within Johnson's established structural playbook.
Read at Filmmaker Magazine
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