Knives Out and the Cinema of Perpetual Grace

“It will become one of your favorite movies of all time.” That’s quite a recommendation, and it came from someone who knows me well. He was referring to the latest installment of the Knives Out franchise, Wake Up Dead Man, which debuted in theaters (and on Netflix) last Friday.

I need a bit more time to metabolize the film before figuring out where it fits in the list of all-time faves, but I can tell you now that he wasn’t blowing smoke. The movie, which was written and directed by Rian Johnson, is something very special — and wholly unexpected. Like the previous installments, it blends peak Agatha Christie with Tenenbaums-era Wes Anderson (and Lebowski-era Coen Brothers) in highly entertaining ways, allowing an ensemble of colorful suspects to bounce off each other before siccing detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) on the case to do what he does best.

Yet Dead Man springs one surprise that its predecessors lacked. This time around, the whodunit serves mainly as a foil to explore the nature of faith. And not faith in general but the Christian faith in specific.

A quick word of background before diving in. Johnson is best known for being the driving force (heh) behind The Last Jedi, AKA the Star Wars film that killed the internet — and possibly the franchise — back in 2017. I was excited when I heard he’d scored that gig, mainly because I adored his first feature, the brilliant high school noir Brick (2005). Looking back, you have to give the guy credit for not playing it safe with the Skywalkers. That’s all I have to say about that, other than I was glad to see Johnson return to his gumshoe roots with the first Knives Out.

What I didn’t know was that Johnson grew up a youth group kid, and according to recent interviews retained a sincere evangelical faith well into his twenties. While he no longer identifies as a Christian — it’s complicated, as they say — Dead Man can be understood as Johnson’s attempt to reflect upon and interrogate the faith that shaped his imagination. By his own admission, he took the various strands of his Christian experience, set them in dialogue/conflict with one another, and let the chips fall where they may. Somehow, the resulting work of art not only avoids patronizing his younger self (or present believers) but also ends up presenting the gospel as elegantly as any film in recent memory. Scorsese’s Silence is the closest contender, I suppose, but that film possesses none of the humor or fun of this one (i.e., you’ll actually watch this.)

And so, if you haven’t binged it yet, go do yourself a favor and press play. If you don’t have time right now, though, this is the place to stop reading, as we’re entering spoiler territory. A few observations:

– The moments between Blanc and Jud are the beating heart of the movie, the most profound of which, to my ears, is the scene in the rain when Jud explains the nature of Christian ministry. There is a divergence between what it means to be a detective and what it means to be a priest, thank God. Jud’s real purpose, in contrast to Blanc’s, is “not to fight the wicked and bring them to justice but to serve them and bring them to Christ.” Woof.

– That admission comes on the heels of Jud asking Blanc why he thinks Jud went into the priesthood to begin with. Blanc conjectures that, after killing a fellow boxer, Jud needed a safe place to hide where his guilty conscience could be assuaged. Jud objects, claiming that “God didn’t hide me or fix me. He loves me when I’m guilty. That’s what I should be doing; not this whodunit game.” Jud is not there, in other words, to straighten anyone out or make sure that sinners get their just desserts. He is there to be an agent of mercy and bear witness to the Friend of Sinners. That he doesn’t live up to that calling perfectly (slapping away a finger or two) only underlines its legitimacy.

– Johnson may be exaggerating the dichotomy between Wicks’ and Jud’s visions of Christianity for dramatic purposes, but he is not making it up. To borrow a crude characterization (forgive me!), think of “Truth” and “Grace” as a continuum, each occupying an opposing end of the spectrum of faith. Neither pole lacks biblical grounding, which is probably why Johnson is careful not to paint Wicks as a charlatan. Wicks is a believer; he has simply put all his eggs in the Truth basket. He sees the world as a dark and threatening place and understands his role as that of holding the line at all costs. This sets him at odds not only with the world outside the church walls (“wolves”!) but increasingly with the folks within those walls too. The circle of righteousness can only narrow.

– While Wicks and his flock certainly scan as conservative, anyone who’s spent time in mainline Protestantism (or on Bluesky) lately knows there are progressive versions of the same dynamic. In fact, Blanc himself is more of a damn-the-torpedoes-crusader-for-truth guy than anything else, just the non-religious, better dressed version. His conflict with Jud may be more polite, but it is a conflict nonetheless.

– The film illustrates how the “Truth” pole of the faith axis, when detached from grace, soon turns hostile to humanity itself, to say nothing of God. The world becomes a battleground rather than a hospital, and before you know it, the ends are justifying the means to prop up various galvanizing antagonisms (and bank accounts). I wish it only happened in the movies! Alas, you see this dynamic playing out in many corners of the Christian landscape today, and again, not just on one side of the political spectrum.

– I don’t mean to suggest, of course, that Truth and Grace are in fact opposites, or somehow zero-sum. The power of Jud’s witness is that any Truth which does not have Grace (Jesus!) at its center is not actually God’s Truth.

– Put another way, the contrast between Jud and Wicks is the difference between Healing and Conquest, or whether God’s salvific mission is to heal the world or to conquer it. In the latter case, God tends to shrink in relation to his “warriors”, without whom the cause would not go forward. No wonder Wicks is so interested in turning his hell-or-high-water evangelism (if you can call it that) into a social media campaign. The egoism is a foregone conclusion.

– Speaking of social media … Cy’s character is a bit over the top, but it’s clear that Johnson has little sympathy for internet personalities — and their viewers by extension. How sad (and hilarious) it is that Cy doesn’t even stick around at the end to hear the full confession. He has what he needs/wants, the actual truth be damned. His inheritance too!

– “That poor girl.” This phrase gets repeated numerous times in relation to the character of Grace, whose name should be a giveaway. The Wicks perspective sees her as the harlot whore who should be shamed, judged, and punished, world without end. Jud’s vantage views her as a desperate soul to be pitied and embraced. If anything, her designation as enemy (or original transgressor à la Eve vying for her Apple) only secures her ultimate sympathy. Enemies are, after all, there to be forgiven.

– Rian Johnson expounded on this core hope in an interview with the National Catholic Reporter: “Only good can come out of loving and forgiving your enemy. Whenever I’m scrolling on social media, I get pissed and angry, and the last thing I want to do is extend grace and forgiveness in those moments. Yet it’s the thing that I most need to do, and it’s the thing that the world needs more of, especially right now.” Amen.

– About Blanc’s near-conversion, I thought it was well done. Not only would a reversal on that score have felt narratively pat, the persistence of Blanc’s unbelief actually preserves the gracious vibe of the film. That is, it’s a story, not propaganda, and a hallelujah moment would’ve compromised the character too much. That said, Blanc is not unmoved. He sacrifices his grand Scooby Doo moment for the sake of the perpetrator. He may not be converted to God, but he is certainly converted to mercy.

– Don’t get me wrong, I could come up with some gripes. The Catholic setting was cool and allowed Johnson to get sacramental in an interesting way, but it was also distractingly far-fetched in places. And while there’s a necessary cartoonish-ness to all the characters, as there is in every Knives Out, Brolin’s in particular could’ve used a couple humanizing details. Not only would the meta-commentary have landed better, the story itself would’ve cohered more.

– Still, the ending is just so beautiful. The fruit of vengeance is made abundantly clear; it leads to death, death, and more death. But vengeance does not have the final word in this movie; absolution does. And that absolution is not applied to Martha after she’s finished sinning; she receives her pardon as she’s in the midst of committing a mortal sin. Then, for the diamond to be placed in the heart of cross — Christ literally taking Eve’s Apple into himself — not only to spare the congregation any further toxic ramifications but to emphasize the indestructibility of the redemption shining out from his broken body … well, I can’t think of anything more poetic. Perhaps storytelling really can get at truths too deep to be expressed any other way.

P.S. There’s so much more to say. The Daily Bread of the cellist. The Walters in line at the bookstore. Jeffrey Wright being awesome. The Larry Norman song playing in the Demon Pizza Bar. The AMAZING Bridget Everett cameo and the interruption it brings. The painfully accurate comment on clergy transitions/successions. You can tell me your favorite Easter Eggs in the comments, as I’m positive there are many I missed. But let’s give Tom Waits the last word: