Saturday nights on King Street are a big deal for the Toronto International Film Festival. That’s where and when the biggest premieres of the festival usually drop, and there was no bigger release this year than Rian Johnson’s “Wake Up Dead Man,” the third film in the “Knives Out” series. If 2022’s “Glass Onion” was a big-energy lark, this one is its opposite, a thematically dense piece that discards Agatha Christie for Edgar Allen Poe and John Dickson Carr. It is a film so rich in ideas that it’s the rare whodunit that seems likely to play even better the second time when following the mystery can take a back seat to considering how Johnson has crafted one of his best screenplays. It’s a movie about faith vs. logic, the fake news era, and even the importance of storytelling. And in a deeply cynical time, it’s a flick that argues for hugs instead of fists, forgiveness instead of division, and it does so by embedding these rich ideas into a swirling mystery for the singular Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig).
Don’t worry, there will be no spoilers here as how a “Knives Out” film unfolds is what brings its fans so much joy. I won’t even tell you who dies. But I will tell you who steals the movie. That’s the great Josh O’Connor as Reverend Jud Duplenticy, who calls himself in one of the film’s many hysterical lines, “Young, dumb, and full of Christ.” A fighter with a dark past, Jud is basically punished by the church after he punches a deacon, sent to a remote parish run by the aggressively righteous Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin). Wicks takes an angry approach to the pulpit, sadistically pushing his flock to such a degree that he strives to get at least one walkout for each sermon. Jud believes in acceptance; Jefferson believes in obeisance.
He gets that from a small group of people whom he has essentially brainwashed into submitting to his beliefs. There’s Martha Delacroix (Glenn Close), who has been a key figure in the church for generations. There’s Dr. Nat Sharp (Jeremy Renner), an alcoholic doctor whose wife left him. There’s Vera Draven (Kerry Washington) and her brother Cy (Daryl McCormack), who films everything for his political future, turning every experience into political capital. There’s the disabled cellist Simone Vivane (Cailee Spaeny), who has given Wicks a fortune for the promise of an impossible cure. Finally, there’s Lee Ross (Andrew Scott), a former hit sci-fi author who has become a paranoid nut. Thomas Haden Church plays the groundskeeper and Mila Kunis the investigating police chief.
Of course, Daniel Craig plays Benoit Blanc, who drops into the film with an intellectual approach to balance Jud’s faithful investigation. O’Connor and Craig make such a phenomenal pair, playfully moving through the mid-section of this film as they banter about faith vs. reason, and how the stories we tell each other and ourselves shape our reality, and not just the ones about Jesus. “Wake Up Dead Man” isn’t just a great mystery—in fact, the resolution of the whodunit might be the weakest of the three—but it’s a conversation starter about the power of mythology, and how certain parts of society use that for evil. Storytellers matter because stories are powerful. They can save lives. They can destroy lives.
More will be written about “Wake Up Dead Man” when it comes out around Thanksgiving, but a final quick note on Johnson’s excellent grip on craft here too. Steve Yedlin’s cinematography is sure to be underrated, turning the grounds of this church into a character by how he glides his camera around it, using a darker visual language than the sun-dappled last film. And Bob Ducsay’s editing gives the film essential momentum (even if it sometimes feels a tick too long at 140 minutes).
Rian Johnson pointed out in his introduction that he loves the mystery genre because of its pliability. He made a cozy mystery in the first film and a vacation one in the second. This time, he wants to take you to church. Amen.
Hikari’s “Rental Family” was the other big Saturday night premiere I hit in Toronto, and this Hirokazu Kore-eda fan (a clear inspiration here) was actively fighting this melodrama for most of the first half. It is a film that is unapologetically manipulative, using a dying old man and a fatherless child as its main emotional weapons. And yet the movie wore me down. Thinking about it more, I actually think its blatant sentimentality is thematically in tune with the plot. It’s a film about people who play emotional roles in the lives of others to produce some kind of catharsis. Based on a real business in Japan (also captured in Werner Herzog’s “Family Romance, LLC”), the rental family workers pretend to be things like a mourner at a funeral for a stranger or even a groom at a fake wedding. And you don’t do that half-heartedly. You do that with all the emotion you can muster, even if it’s fake.
Phillip Vandarploeug (Brendan Fraser) is a commercial actor living in Tokyo. He gets an assignment that brings him into the circle of a rental family company run by Shinji (Takehiro Hira), quickly becoming their token white guy. He gets two important gigs. In one, he plays the biological father of a girl named Mia (Shannon Mahina Gorman), whose mother needs him for her daughter to get into an elite private school. Mia doesn’t know that Phillip isn’t really her dad. It’s an unsettling lie to tell a child, and Hikari and co-writer Stephen Blahut don’t really edge into the darkness of it, choosing instead to push us to like Phillip as much as possible. (And Fraser, as usual, is immensely likable.) Phillip also gets a job pretending to be a journalist for an old actor named Kikuo Hasegawa (Akira Emoto), allowing him to be both a father figure and a son figure, dealing with his own repressed emotions while he helps others.
Despite how much I suspect people will love Fraser’s work here, I found “Rental Family” richer as it got away from its central character into the supporting players impacted by this entire affair. Mari Yamamoto is excellent as Aiko, someone embittered by the roles she’s had to play, especially when husbands hire her to play the other woman after getting caught (instead of revealing the actual mistress). Emoto takes a part that could have just been emotional damage and gives Kikuo grace and history. Hira is very good as a man who seems to ignore some of the darker aspects of his profession. His part hints at a more ambitious version of this story that really digs into how we can’t ask people to pretend to be someone else without bringing some of themselves into it too.
“Rental Family” may not be Kore-eda or even Herzog, but it wears its heart on its sleeve in a way that’s ultimately endearing. Sometimes even the most emotionally manipulative material can produce a response, bringing you through something fake to find what feels real to you.
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