I've been looking forward to this one for months now. Ever since Wake Up Dead Man was announced, it was a safe bet that Netflix would put Rian Johnson's latest Knives Out mystery into cinemas for at least a week or two before adding it to its streaming library, and it confirmed that plan a few months ago.
I bought my ticket for opening night without much hesitation. While I love streaming at home as much as the next person, I'm also a huge believer in the cinema experience, and have found that approach vindicated by the pleasure of watching A House of Dynamite and Frankenstein in recent months alone.
Annoyingly, though, because Netflix doesn't put its films out as widely as you might think, my local and very reliable Picturehouse, in West Norwood, doesn't have Wake Up Dead Man in its listings. That meant a choice between going to Picturehouse Central, which is always great but is a pain to get to and more expensive, or rolling the dice on a new option.
So, I went to Clapham yesterday, to its Picturehouse, and was reminded that sometimes streaming at home can genuinely be a better option than paying for a ticket. I'm a bit of a screen snob, to be fair, but it's rare for even my girlfriend to come out of a film chatting more about how terrible the screen was – which is the honour that the Clapham Picturehouse's Screen 2 earned.
It's the most bizarre screen I've been to in ages, with a seating plan that made me assume it would be a way larger screen. In fact, it's just greedy, with a long and disproportionate tunnel of seats that far outstrips the small screen it actually offers. Plus, that screen is also bizarrely high up and slightly off-centre from the seats, making it seriously unimpressive to watch.
Sound quality was nothing more than fine (not a patch on the Dolby screening room I visited last week), but at basically £15 each, this all felt like daylight robbery. I'm sure the cinema might have a good Screen 1, but with Wicked: For Good squatting on it, I don't know if I'll ever bother verifying that.
Next time, I'll stick to Picturehouse Central for Netflix releases I need to see early, but this all served as a useful reminder that you're no mug if you just wait for Netflix's actual streaming releases. Wake Up Dead Man comes to the platform on 12 December, and I suspect that I'd have had a better time with it on my OLED TV and with my Sonos system powering things.
Of course, that's a lot of chat about a movie I saw last night without addressing the movie itself at all – but there aren't any surprises there. I really enjoyed the film for what it was, and it seems like Rian Johnson could possibly just keep making these forever without it getting stale.
Some people might be a little disappointed by how light it is on actual Benoit Blanc content, but as someone who loves Josh O'Connor's work, I had a great time, with the only issue being the substandard screening I had to endure. My advice? Either head to a screen you know you can rely on, or catch it on your own system, where you control all the variables, in a couple of weeks.
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