Josh O’Connor in Wake Up Dead Man
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. (Rian Johnson is a wise man.) The sponsor bumpers started at 6:05; “A TIFF miracle!” the man next to me marveled.
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 reference points for which are explicated in a church group reading list within the film: Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie (of course) and, to the delight of my not-so-inner estorecist, John Dickson Carr, whose name you certainly don’t hear trotted out outside of specialist circles these days. 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.
I’m amused that Johnson is running the same structural playbook—a first act setting up a mystery whose endgame is not “who did it,” but “we need to find who did it to save the wrongly accused,” plus MAGA jokes—to different ends every time; that, of course, is what many mystery novelists did during their various series while fending off the tedium of being tied to a recurring protagonist. (The Knives Out look is also rigorously codified by now: big interior sets, large windows with huge lights streaming through them.) After a few establishing shots of Blanc, Dead Man’s first act proceeds to give the people exactly what they want: Josh O’Connor as Jud Duplenticy, a hot priest who boxes. O’Connor is earnest and surprisingly funny; his antagonist is Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin), a direct Trump stand-in who’s accused of keeping his flock loyal through stoking their fear and anger, etc. Wicks aside, the politics seem more like window dressing than usual and as a consideration of the role fundamentalist religion is playing in accelerating our national decline Wake Up is annoyingly if understandably wishy-washy. But the every-20-minute twists land well and surprisingly, though at 141 minutes this is way too long. Nonetheless, I’m glad to see mystery scholarship-in-action continue to get such a lavish stage in all its sub-genre forms.
Olivier Assayas has iterated what globalism looks like in international film co-productions (Irma Vep), hentai content creation (demonlover) and terrorism-for-hire (Carlos). The Wizard of the Kremlin, a study of pseudonymized Putin ex-advisor Vladislav Surkov fits into that lineage by considering the implications of Russian internet troll farms and their destabilization of the west. But Assayas’s choice of material also aligns with his longtime fascination with Guy Debord and Situationism. In A Post-May Adolescence, an essay styled as an open letter to Debord’s widow Alice, Assayas recalls that one of the difficulties he had in choosing to pursue filmmaking was a theoretical contradiction: how could he do work under a capitalist apparatus that inherently relies upon alienated labor? His conclusion was unexpected: “it came to me that non-alienated collective work could exist. To make a film was an adventure, a game, where each had his part, where each court invest his own talent, his beliefs and his energy[.]”
Renamed Vadim Baranov in Giuliano da Empoli’s source novel, a name that carries over in Assayas’s film, Surkov likewise came from an arts background but reached an entirely different conclusion about where to apply his talents, choosing to shape reality rather than words. Surkov has often (and kind of ridiculously) been deemed less a politician than a kind of large-scale artist who, per Eduard Limonov, “turned Russia into a wonderful postmodernist theatre, where he experiments with old and new political models.” Da Empoli’s book treats Baranov in similarly dimestore-Baudrillard terms; while Assayas and co-writer Emmanual Carrère basically follow the novel’s general outline and political diagnoses faithfully, their adaptation is in many particulars an improvement. These include characterization: love interest Ksenia (Alicia Vikander) is now less repellant than the book’s conception of a power-hungry bitch from hell; likewise, Baranov himself (Paul Dano) comes across as slightly less of a sociopathic void. And while the adaptation hews closely to the novel’s trajectory, historical diagnosis and main incidents, it also explicitly threads in Assayas’s own past: a chaotic party scene and a brief disappearance at the end echo similar beats in Cold Water, although that latter rager also had the purpose of restaging the birth of punk music, another seismic event in Assayas’s upbringing. The book assigns Baranov an interest in writer Yevgeny Zamyatin, but the movie adds a line where Ksenia dismisses the author, and therefore Baranov, as “an icon of the most conventional avant-gardists”—a dead-on diagnostic summary of Assayas’s influences and output if you’re feeling uncharitable.
As is inevitably going to be the case when a French production based in Latvia stars actors whose American and British accents are sliding all over the place while pretending to be Russian, Wizard is unavoidably goofy. At certain angles, Jude Law does look like the perpetually frowning Putin; at other times, he can’t help but look like himself. Likewise, while Assayas has a lot of fun making fake archival material look like the real thing (lots of ’90s VHS and early-aughts analogue-to-HD format liminality), the production also uses the currently ubiquitous and fashionable lenses that fall off at the edges. These are accidentally deployed once during ostensible ’90s footage, rendering all the technical reconstruction moot. I would describe the film’s political diagnosis as both accurate and unsurprising; its real meat is in further illuminating the contours of Assayas’s life-long project.
