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The Guardian // Entertainment // Movies

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery review – whodunnit threequel is murderously good fun

Sunday 7th September 2025, 12:42PM

Toronto film festival: after Glass Onion underwhelmed, Rian Johnson’s self-aware, star-packed Benoit Blanc series makes a barnstorming return to formIf Glass Onion wasn’t quite the deserving follow-up to Knives Out that many of us had hoped it would be (it was more focused on the bigger rather than better), it was at the very least a deserved victory lap. Writer-director Rian Johnson’s 2019 whodunnit brought us back to the starry, slippery fun of the 70s and 80s, when films like this would be a dime a dozen and it was a surprise hit, making almost eight times its budget at the global box office. While Kenneth Branagh had seen commercial success already with his Poirot revival two years prior, his retreads felt too musty, and the actor-director too miscast, for the genre to truly feel like it was entering an exciting new period.Johnson’s threequel, Wake Up Dead Man, is the second as part of his Netflix deal (one that cost an estimated $450m) and arrives as the whodunnit genre has found itself close to over-saturation on both big but mostly small screen. Yet as many murders as there might have now been in buildings or residences involving

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