Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery
Directed by Rian Johnson
Wednesday, November 26, 1 and 6 pm
Friday, November 28, 1 and 6 pm
Saturday, November 29, 2 and 6 pm
Sunday, November 30, 1 and 4 pm
Wednesday, December 3, 1 and 6 pm
Thursday, December 4, 1 and 6 pm
$12 | $8 Speed members
“It works, and it’s no big mystery why—Rian Johnson knows his form and format, and delivers on it, playing with tone and message, but never losing sight of why these stores are so damn entertaining to watch and unravel.”—Kate Erbland, IndieWire
The latest entry in one of the most successful mystery series in recent film history is as strong, inventive, and entertaining as ever.
In 2019, Oscar-nominated writer-director Rian Johnson and Daniel Craig revitalized the British drawing room murder mystery with the gleeful, star-laden Knives Out, creating their own version of Agatha Christie’s unflappable detective Hercule Poirot with Craig’s brilliant Southerner, Benoit Blanc. The follow-up, Glass Onion, focused on a tech-bro billionaire, ratcheting up the humor. Wake Up Dead Man shifts gears again with a relatively somber look into the tensions between faith and logic.
This time, Johnson riffs on the dark, gothic elements of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue—a seemingly impossible locked-room scenario involving a corpse—while still incorporating many of the series’ signature elements.
Set in a small town and focusing on its local church, Wake Up Dead Man is packed with stars, including Josh O’Connor as a the younger cleric to Josh Brolin’s autocratic, abrasive priest, Glenn Close as his right-hand person, plus Kerry Washington, Andrew Scott, Cailee Spaeny, Jeremy Renner, and Mila Kunis as a local cop who is as determined as Blanc to solve this seemingly insoluble case. And there’s a murder that presents itself as an impossible crime. All that and Craig delivers perhaps his best Blanc yet. 2025, U.S., DCP, 144 minutes. Rated PG-13.
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