Of the dead, another great police officer

After Daggers in the back (2019) and Daggers in the back: the mystery of the glass onion (2022) the third chapter of the mystery saga arrives in theaters, in a limited format. Daggers in the back: From the dead It shows, on the one hand, that Rian Johnson remains passionate about the genre and on the other that he has no interest in repeating the formulaEven though he is the guiding thread, our insightful and peculiar Benoit Blanc continues to be the pole of attraction.

of the dead Leave the filigrees behind and focus more on the interpretations and text, which are clearer and sharper than in the previous edition. In fact, dialectics is one of the strong points of a script in which faith and heresy are in constant conflict in the dialogues and even at the very heart of the plot’s resolution.

The film’s other great asset is the performances: in addition to Daniel Craig who continues to feel comfortable in the role of the titular detective, Josh O’Connor, Glenn Close, Josh Brolin, Andrew Scott, Cailee Spaeny, Kerry Washington, Jeremy Renner, Daryl McCormack and Mila Kunis stop by to have fun.

This, like the previous ones, It’s a film that works as a homage to detective novels and films in which you have to find out who the killer is, but adding a lot of sense of humor.even with allusions to Scooby Doo trick stories.

With the Church we found

Father Jud Duplenticy is a former vocational boxing priest who, after beating up a deacon, is sent to a congregation to serve as an assistant to the reviled Monsignor Wicks who seems determined to drive out any new parishioners while tightly tying up his fixed flock, spewing all manner of aberrations from his pulpit.

Nine months after his transfer, Jud is certain that his attitude is disastrous and that, instead of having established a healthy community, everything revolves around economic interests and the culture of fear, so he decides to present his arguments to him and remove him from his ministry.

Shortly afterwards, while on duty, Wicks collapses and dies, to the shock of everyone present. The main suspect is that young priest who seems to want to impose himself to lead the congregation, but it will be Benoit Blanc who will have to use his deduction skills to discover the answers to how, by whose hands and why Wicks died.

Jud himself will offer to collaborate with justice, although each new revelation seems to incriminate him even more.

If there’s one thing Rian Johnson likes, it’s playing with narrative and viewers’ expectations, and that’s exactly what he does in of the dead. Instead of putting our well-known character in the spotlight from the beginning, he strives to present himself peteneras, transforming Josh O’Connor’s character into the true protagonist of the story. With him the story begins and ends. The murder comes to test his faith, as happened before with his outburst of rage and will happen later, when he reconsiders his vocation based on the direction of the investigation.

Despite having a very ensemble cast, the film actually focuses on fewer characters than on other occasions, which gives the cast’s gems less opportunity to shine (specifically, I would have appreciated more presence from Andrew Scott, Cailee Spaeny and Kerry Washington).

With everything and with that of the dead It is very well resolved and, despite lasting more than two hours, it leaves a very good taste in the mouth. And Johnson marvelously combines “the old” and “the new.” In other words, with all its literary references, among which is of course Poe, but also Agatha Christie or John Dickson Carr and their The hollow man, has the audacity to introduce many elements that update the story such as hate speech in the age of disinformation, the dishonest practices of aspiring politicians, or the dismantling through parody of many of the themes of extreme and highly consolidated ideologies thanks to social networks. The libretto is shamelessly stuffed, nothing is left out, but it demonstrates great sensitivity to each person’s faith.

Daggers in the back: From the dead is the most mature film on the set to date. Johnson demonstrates true mastery of combining and articulating the gears of the story (although he also does some tricks) and uses his loudspeaker to denounce, with a great sense of humor, some of the biggest problems of our days.