Film Review: Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (2025)

Though I've never seen any of the other Knives Out movies, Wake Up Dead Man was actually the entire I went to TIFF 2025. One of my dear friends is a big fan of the series, and because they live close enough to visit, I asked if they'd be interested in going since it was pretty likely the movie would premiere at the festival a few months early.

They were on board, and thus began my TIFF Experience overall: one where I woke up excessively early on a supposed vacation, the fact that I was sick be damned, and queued on the TIFF website to try and get tickets.

I tried every day of the presale, to no avail, and that was when we made our decision to get Rush passes.

With no guarantee of getting in, we lined up for Wake Up Dead Man's World Premiere screening. We weren't anywhere near the front of the line, and our chances were low, so we spent most of the waiting period looking for last-minute tickets as our only shot.

(In the end, we got lucky: someone in the line outside had upgraded their seats, and was willing to sell us their original tickets. The exchange was made, and we got in just before the last minute.)

With the story of why I'm watching this before the others out of the way, let's get into the film itself:

The opening moments of Rian Johnson's latest film, and my introduction to his work, remind me distinctly of the sports anime we often watched in my high school's anime club. The opening scene even takes place in a basketball court (one which may be familiar to anyone who's ever seen a certain Rick Astley music video).

Our protagonist and point of view character, Jud, is an instant underdog with the same sort of spirit, heart, and drive I associate with those shows. An actual former boxer who has the attitude of a kid begging the coach to put him on the field, except that in this story the field in question is the Catholic church.

(Religion and spirituality are a core focus of the narrative and the themes of the story, though not in a way that I, someone who has never been Catholic and was only theoretically raised to be religious, ever struggled to follow or understand. Still, if those are themes you struggle with for any reason, that's something to be aware of beforehand.)

The movie takes its time setting up the eventual locked-room murder mystery (a classic concept, and one I'm personally immediately invested in). Early on, it's instead focused on establishing the eventual victim and each of the suspects as characters in their own right, with history and desires of their own.

As I said, I haven't seen the other Knives Out movies, so I can't comment on those. But at least in this one, detective Benoit Blanc doesn't appear until some time into the film (when the murder finally takes place), which means that the aforementioned suspects and victim are instead introduced to us and characterized through their interactions with Jud; who, rather than being a detective or any other inherently combative/antagonistic force, is simply an unwelcome newcomer to their small town community, and specifically to their church.

The story takes several twists and turns, sure to entertain anyone looking for a good time, and yet it also never feels unfair to those who enjoy trying to solve the mystery before the pieces come together; which is, in my opinion, a difficult thing for a mystery to manage.

Film Review: Scarlet (2025)

It's been several months since I watched Scarlet, and I'm still not sure whether I like it or not.

I don't know if I think it's a good movie. I don't know if I think it's a bad movie.

Despite the fact that I have now seen exactly two of his films, I have a decidedly complicated relationship with the work of Mamoru Hosoda. 

The celebrated Wolf Children and the underwhelming Scarlet seem to highlight the best and worst of his work, his weaknesses and his strengths—even if I am, admittedly, not the best person to be judging either.

It also suffers, somewhat, from the cost-cutting and production measures often utilized in anime and anime films specifically (in particular long stretches of no or limited movement). 

Granted, this aspect would probably have felt a lot less jarring if I was watching it on a streaming service rather than in a particularly fancy theatre at a film festival, so I hesitate to judge it too harshly based on that.

It isn't as if there's nothing else to say about it, after all.

In a word, Scarlet feels confused. It's a film at war with itself: its direction is unclear, as if it doesn’t know what it wants to say.

(It's technically a loose retelling of Hamlet, with Scarlet in his place, but this fact is rarely relevant beyond the fact that Scarlet's main motivation is wanting revenge on her uncle Claudius for killing her father.)

The character of Hijiri, clearly intended as a counterpoint to the title character of Scarlet, is underutilized to the point of feeling pointless; as are many of the concepts the film puts forward in general. To an extent, so is Scarlet herself.

The recurring theme of music as a form of connection goes nowhere after a single scene that feels strange and out of place in the story it seems to be trying to tell.

The Otherworld's repeated emphasis on being a place of convergence is never truly relevant, though it feels like it should be; instead, it mostly seems to be a plot device for the modern-day Hijiri's presence in the story. What worldbuilding we do get for the Otherworld in this vein is intriguing, and I would have personally liked for it to have more presence in the story.

This film feels as if it wants to be too many things at once. Many of the things I initially assumed were setup or plot threads that would return never see any payoff.

The actual payoff, the narrative conclusion, is likewise unsatisfying. The events of it appear at odds with its perceived message, though what that message is remains overall unclear.

In the end, Scarlet is a film that paints a picture it fails to live up to. With that said, the themes and ideas portrayed here are still clearly worth exploring, and I feel that a different story (or even a different approach to this one) might have done them justice.

TIFF Experience: Tickets & Rush Lines

The saga of I and my companion actually getting to see Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein spans almost a consecutive twenty-seven hours.

Tickets were impossible to get for Wake Up Dead Man and Frankenstein for any regular TIFF member (and even for several of the higher-ranking ones, if rumors are to be believed), and/or anyone with less than $400 a ticket to burn, for quite some time.

(I would know just how impossible it was for a regular member to snag these tickets: I spent four hours in ticket queue lines while on the worst road trip of my life only to be in a triple-digit place in the online queue, and several similar experiences that entire week were had after waking up absurdly early in my cheap motel room, all to come out of it empty-handed.)

That died down a bit eventually, with later screenings at normal prices (or at least significantly less inflated ones), but those tickets were still fairly competitive and we both had our hearts set on the premiere screenings, so we picked up rush passes instead—significantly cheaper than even a single ticket to either premiere, unless you somehow got very lucky. While Wake Up Dead Man was my friend's most hyped film, I was decidedly more excited for Frankenstein.

Rush, for context, is different from standard admission: in theory, it's used to fill empty seats. 

(In practice there's often large sections of empty seating anyway, paired with upset and disappointed people outside. Supposedly this is done to avoid disturbing audience members, but when entire rows or sections are empty it's difficult to reconcile the stated purpose with the lived experience.)

A Rush pass allows unlimited access to Rush, so if you get in you don't have to pay the ticket price: just scan the pass you already paid for.

(A Rush pass this year was $80. Regular screening Rush was $29, premium Rush apparently started at $43.)

On the first day of our tale, we arrived around noon for the rush line for the premiere of Frankenstein at 6 PM.

We were the 50th and 51st in line, and didn't even get close to getting in.

So we made a plan: knowing the next screening was at 11:30 AM the next day, and that an unofficial line would almost certainly begin around 6 or 7 AM (well before either festival or venue staff began to arrive), we camped out in the Entertainment District overnight.

We found a place to charge our dead-and-dying phones and rested a while, made our way to a restaurant to kill some time (shoutout to the Bombay; a fantastic Indian place not far from the festival that was open until 6 AM!), and then found our primary spot: a 24-hour A&W (well, technically 23; they kicked us out at 6 for cleaning).

This was our chosen place for two reasons: it was inside with places to sit (since we're both physically disabled, and I was getting cold outside), and had a good view of the venue's eventual Rush line.

It was around 7 AM that the line formally began, with me sitting at a nearby Starbucks while my friend joined with the line for a bit and explained our situation.

I wasn't there, but I was told they were sympathetic to our experience, and given that we were in fact counted as first and second in line when staff did eventually show (after 10 AM) I'm inclined to believe that was in fact the truth.

We were lucky in that they did, in fact, allow Rush into this screening (not always guaranteed), and as the first two in line we made it in easily.

Rush sometimes doesn't get in until up to twenty minutes into the screening, but we managed to get in before the actual start of the film. I'm pretty sure I missed the first couple minutes anyway, but not enough to be missing anything important.

It's highly talked up among festival-goers, particularly for the atmosphere of Rush lines, but as disabled individuals that's an experience we largely missed out on. There are lobby passes to allow sitting in the lobby rather than standing in lines for over an hour, but this keeps you separate from everyone else; there aren't many chances to strike up conversation when it's just you.

(Additionally, these extremely long lines forming hours before any formal start time is itself inaccessible; the fact is that you're forced to camp out regardless of physical ability, especially for an earlier screening, because no one will be tracking the numbers until much later. We were placed at a disadvantage that most people in line presumably did not have.)

In the end, I didn't exactly hate my experience with the Rush pass, but I don't think I'd do it again. 

Which may well be my opinion on TIFF in general, unless I somehow come into enough money to actually justify the expense of a curated ticket package or something similar.