Knives Out: Wake Up Dead Man will have you singing hosannas to the movie gods.

What sets writer-director Rian Johnson’s Knives Out films apart from other franchises on the current movie landscape isn’t just their ingeniously twisty scripts and A-list-packed casts, it’s their distinctive take on the possibilities of serial filmmaking. As with the Agatha Christie or Arthur Conan Doyle mysteries that are among Johnson’s primary inspirations, each installment starts the Knives Out universe anew: The full cast of characters turns over, with the exception of Daniel Craig’s courtly private eye Benoit Blanc, and the locations and even the tone radically shift. This reset gives Johnson a chance to explore, not the deep “lore” of an extended fictional universe, but the deeper well of his own beliefs and ideas—including about the messed-up world just outside the theater d