Rian Johnson’s mystery films starring Daniel Craig as Benoit Blanc owe their existence to classic murder mysteries like those from the great Agatha Christie. Having said that, the films have also been very different, with Knives Out and Glass Onion both including some sort of significant twist on the genre tropes.
As somebody who loves classic murder mysteries, the twists in the previous Rian Johnson movies have been fun ways to refresh a tired genre. At the same time, the tropes of the classic whodunit are part of what makes the genre so much fun. This is why I’m so happy to learn that while the newest Knives Out Mystery, Wake Up Dead Man, will be darker than the previous mysteries, it will also be more like a classic murder mystery than the previous films. Speaking with Deadline, Rian Johnson said…
The reality of this movie, it has almost like a more traditional murder mystery structure. This is how most Agatha Christie books work, where in the first act you meet all the suspects, you meet the protagonist, who’s not the detective. Then the murder happens, and the detective shows up.
The setup of Wake Up Dead Man, at least in structure, sounds a lot like that of Knives Out. In that case, Ana de Armas played the film’s actual protagonist, with Daniel Craig’s detective only getting called in after she found herself involved in a murder. The major twist there was that the protagonist was also the killer, or at least that’s the way it seemed for the majority of the film.
In this case, Josh O’Connor will be taking on that role as the film’s protagonist. Based on the Wake Up Dead Man trailer, it appears O’Connor will act as a sort of assistant to Craig’s Benoit Blanc.
Both Knives Out and Glass Onion change up the traditional mystery by giving the audience more information than they usually have in this type of story. It sounds like, in the case of Wake Up Dead Man, if it is a “more traditional murder mystery structure” that may not be the case. If we get a setup that opens like Knives Out, but without that additional information, we’ll have a movie that will probably follow most of the classic murder mystery set pieces.
As much as I love the way Rian Johnson has put his own twist on the genre, I’ve always wanted to see Benoit Blanc in a more traditional mystery. If I, as an audience member, am given all the same clues as Benoit Blanc, could I solve the mystery before he does? I’d like the opportunity to find out, and the previous films haven’t really given us that opportunity.. If this is the last Benoit Blanc mystery, it would be great if the final film subverts our expectations of the murder mystery by actually giving us a classic one.