After Roasting Elon Musk, the ‘Knives Out’ Franchise Turns Its Attention to Trump

Rian Johnson’s whodunnit Knives Out, aka Foghorn Leghorn Investigates, was a big hit when it debuted back in 2019. Thankfully, it didn’t mark the end of Benoit Blanc’s adventures. The detective returned for 2022’s Glass Onion and will soon be seen again in the upcoming Wake Up Dead Man. 

While it doesn’t hit theaters until late November, shortly before a December 12th release on Netflix, Wake Up Dead Man just premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival to rave reviews. But one person who’s probably not going to love the third “Knives Out Mystery” is President Donald Trump.

As revealed in the recently-released teaser trailer, Wake Up Dead Man’s titular dead man is the monsignor of a small town church, played by Josh Brolin, who gets bumped off in a seemingly impossible manner. 

It becomes very clear, very early on in the movie that Msgr. Wicks is intended as a Trump analogue. He has an intense oratorical style that alienates many people — including the people he specifically tries to alienate — always stoking fear and division. But his sermons have won over a dedicated band of followers who seem to have a cult-like devotion to the leader, despite his obvious moral hypocrisy. And we learn that there’s virtually nothing that the problematic leader can do or say to lose their support. 

If all that wasn’t obvious enough, at one point in the movie, Wicks is encouraged to post videos of himself online in order to appeal to the far right and boost his profile. He could even become president one day as a result, one character tells him, presumably while resisting the urge to wink directly at the camera.

This is hardly the first time that the Knives Out series has combined mystery and political commentary. The first movie featured that creepy alt-right kid, or as Blanc referred to him, the “the Nazi child masturbating in the bathroom.”

But the movie was mostly an attempt to lampoon American xenophobia, not just from the right, but wealthy entitled liberals like the Thrombey family. The Thrombeys act supportive of Ana de Armas’ character Marta, until she threatens their inheritance and everybody turns on her.

Then the sequel, Glass Onion, found Edward Norton playing a moronic tech bro billionaire, which coincidentally, was released around the same time that Elon Musk purchased/ruined Twitter. Johnson claimed that the blatant Musk parody was originally intended to be more of a pastiche of uber-rich dummies, since it was written prior to the Twitter drama. 

It does seem as though the thing that unites all three of these movies — other than recurring actors, mysterious murders and titles plucked from Spotify — is a healthy disdain for the wealthy and powerful.