TIFF 2025: Wake Up Dead Man, rental family | Festivals and awards

Saturday evenings on King Street are a big problem for the Toronto International Film Festival. This is where the first first of all in the festival generally fall, and there was no bigger release this year than Rian Johnson “Wake up, dead man”, The third film in the series “Knives Out”. If “Glass Onion” of 2022 was a large energy lark, it is its opposite, a thematic play which rejects Agatha Christie for Edgar Allen Poe and John Dickson Carr. It is a film so rich in ideas that it is the rare whodunit that seems to play the second time even better when the mystery can take a rear seat to think about how Johnson has designed one of his best scenarios. It is a film on faith against logic, the false era of news and even the importance of narration. And in a deeply cynical period, it is a film that pleads for the hugs instead of the fists, sorry rather than a division, and it does it by integrating these rich ideas into a swirling mystery for the singular Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig).

Do not worry, there will be no spoilers here because how a film of “knives” takes place, this is what brings so much joy to his fans. I won’t even tell you who dies. But I’m going to tell you who steals the film. It is the great Josh O’Connor as Reverend Jud Duplenticy, who calls himself in one of the many hysterical lines of the film, “young, mute and full of Christ”. Fighter with a dark past, Jud is essentially punished by the church after hitting a deacon, sent to a distant parish led by the agressively just Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin). Wicks adopts an angry approach to the pulpit, saddically pushing his herd to a degree such that he strives to obtain at least a ranging for each sermon. Jud believes in acceptance; Jefferson believes in obedience.

He obtained this from a small group of people he essentially washed the brain to submit to his beliefs. There is Martha Delacroix (Glenn Close), which has been a key figure of the church for generations. There is Dr. Nat Sharp (Jeremy Renner), an alcoholic doctor whose woman left him. There is Vera Draven (Kerry Washington) and his brother Cy (Daryl McCormack), who films everything for his political future, transforming each experience into political capital. There is the handicapped cellist Simone Vivane (Caiee Spaeny), who gave Wicks a fortune for the promise of an impossible healing. Finally, there is Lee Ross (Andrew Scott), a former successful science fiction author who has become a paranoid nut. The Thomas Haden church plays the goalkeeper and Mila Kunis, the police chief.

Of course, Daniel Craig plays Benoit Blanc, who falls into the film with an intellectual approach to balance the faithful investigation of Jud. O’Connor and Craig make such a phenomenal pair, moving with playful through the median section of this film when they joke about faith against reason, and how the stories that we are racing and ourselves shape our reality, and not only those of Jesus. “Wake Up Dead Man” is not only a great mystery – in fact, the resolution of the whodunit could be the weakest of the three – but it is a starter of conversation on the power of mythology, and how certain parts of society use this for evil. The storytellers count because the stories are powerful. They can save lives. They can destroy lives.

More will be written on “Wake Up Dead Man” when he comes out around Thanksgiving, but a last quick note on the excellent taking of Johnson on Craft here too. The cinematography of Steve Yedlin is sure to be underestimated, transforming the terrain of this church into a character by the way he slides his camera around him, using a darker visual language than the last film in Sun. And Bob Ducsay’s edition gives the film the essential momentum (even if it sometimes feels a tick too long at 140 minutes).

Rian Johnson underlined in his introduction that he loves the mystery genre because of his flexibility. He made a comfortable mystery in the first film and one of the holidays in the second. This time, he wants to take you to the church. Amen.

Hikari “Rental family” It was the other big first of Saturday evening that I struck in Toronto, and this fan of Hirokazu Kore-Eda (a clear inspiration here) actively fought this melodrama during most of the first half. It is a film that is shamelessly manipulated, using an old dying man and a fatherless child as the main emotional weapons. And yet, the film exhausted me. By thinking more about it, I actually think that its flagrant sentimentality is thematically in line with the intrigue. It is a film about people who play an emotional role in the lives of others to produce a kind of catharsis. Based on a real business in Japan (also captured in Werner Herzog’s “Family Romance, LLC”), workers in the rental family claim to be things like mourning during a funeral for a foreigner or even a groom during a false marriage. And you don’t do it without enthusiasm. You do this with all the emotion you can gather, even if it is false.

PHILLIP VANDAD (Brendan Fraser) is a commercial player living in Tokyo. He obtained a mission that brings him to the circle of a family rental business led by Shinji (Takehiro Hira), quickly becoming their symbolic white guys. He obtained two important concerts. In one, he plays the biological father of a daughter named Mia (Shannon Mahina Gorman), whose mother needs him to make her daughter enter a private elite school. Mia does not know that Phillip is not really her father. It is a disturbing lie to tell a child, and Hikari and co-series Stephen Blahut do not really lean into darkness, rather choosing to push us to love Phillip as much as possible. (And Fraser, as usual, is extremely sympathetic.) 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 paternal figure and a figure of son, dealing with his own repressed emotions while he helps others.

Despite how much I suspect that people will love Fraser’s work here, I found the “rental family” richer by moving away from his central character in support players affected by this case. Mari Yamamoto is excellent as aiko, someone embittered by the roles she had to play, especially when the husbands hire her to play the other woman after being caught (instead of revealing the real mistress). Emoto participates in a game that could have been emotional damage and gives Kikuo Grace and History. Hira is very good as a man who seems to ignore some of the darkest aspects of her profession. Its part suggests a more ambitious version of this story which really digs the way we cannot ask people to pretend to be someone else without also having a game.

The “rental family” may not be Kore-Eda or even Herzog, but she carries her heart on her sleeve in a way that is ultimately endearing. Sometimes, even the most emotionally manipulative material can produce an answer, bringing you something wrong to find what seems real to you.