I consider the Knives Out series to be the best detective films currently being made so I’m always down for more of them. This one is especially delightful for me as it pits the atheistic and rational Benoit Blanc against the mystery of religion. It does take a while to get going as a dead body doesn’t even show up until maybe an hour in. I think it falls short of the cleverness of the first film in how the murder was carried out but the motivations of the characters, the religious theme and how it ties in with current events all make up for it.

Blanc’s latest case takes him to a small parish in upstate New York. It is currently led Monsignor Jefferson Wicks, grandson of the church’s founder. The current parish is shrinking as Wicks’ incendiary preaching turns off newcomers while preserving a faithful core of followers. A young priest Jud Duplenticy is sent there to help rejuvenate the parish but is immediately made to feel unwelcome. Wicks openly indulges in vices and fantasizes of wealth. His flock idol worships him as he absolves them of their sins. The increasingly disgusted Jud resolves to oppose Wicks and lead his flock to what Christianity should really be. Then during a Good Friday service, Wicks retreats to a nook to rest after delivering a fiery diatribe. As Jud takes over, he hears a sound and sees that Wicks has collapsed. As he rushes over to check with the parishioners rising to their feet to follow him, he finds blood on Wicks’ back and a blade seemingly embedded in him. One of his flock who is a doctor pronounced him dead and suspicion immediately falls on Jud. The local police chief then summons Blanc to investigate.

The film opens with a long, drawn out exposition on the backstory of the parish. It’s narratively clunky but needed I suppose to establish the key characters and their motivations. The references to real world current events are similarly on the nose which the film even lampshades by making a joke about how they’ll all end up on a Netfllix show. You have the young influencer and would be politician, the alcoholic and misogynist town doctor, the disabled woman who has given all of her money to Wicks in hopes of a miracle cure and so on. Wicks himself is a religious version of Trump. The intent is to highlight the misinformation, divisive manipulation and cynicism in US politics. Again, I don’t think Rian Johnson pulls this off with any particular brilliance here but it is topical and helps gives the film a broader meaning. I do like that Blanc is explicitly atheistic and never lets up on that, while still acknowledging the value of grace as personified by Jud.

The best part of the film to me is still how it’s explicitly set up as an impossible murder and that’s what attracts Blanc to the case. He compares it multiple times to John Dickson Carr’s The Hollow Man as a near perfect, locked room mystery. Jud even castigates Blanc for his obsession about merely solving the case, ignoring the human consequences for everyone involved. The solution as it turns out is both clever and relatively simple. More satisfying still is that the scenario lends itself to an obvious solution but it would be unfair and trite to boot. So Johnson meant it as a red herring for the audience. I continue to love how Blanc doesn’t have impossible knowledge or far-fetched deductive leaps of logic. He simply notices things including what others say in passing. That’s why this series continues to present mysteries that are fair and at least in theory possible for the audience to figure out.

As an ensemble film with a large cast of characters, it’s also fun to watch all of the recognizable actors hamming it up here. This entry doesn’t have the pure elegance of the first film and I’m not likely to be sympathetic to a character like Jud, but I’d consider this to be a first-rate detective film and great entertainment.