London Film Festival kick-starts with Daniel Craig starrer

Daniel Craig's third outing as the charismatic detective Benoit Blanc in Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery opened the London Film Festival on Wednesday, kicking off 12 days of red carpets, screenings and talks with the likes of Oscar winners Daniel Day-Lewis and Chloe Zhao.

Craig led co-stars including Glenn Close, Josh Brolin and Mila Kunis on the red carpet for the latest Knives Out whodunit, which has a more gothic and darker tone than 2019's Knives Out and Glass Onion released in 2022.

"They're all different from each other, which is what I think we set out to do, we wanted them all to be standalone so that each one had a different flavour," Craig told Reuters of the three films. Asked what it was like to take on the role once again, he added: “I wouldn't do it unless I had fun doing it."

In the murder mystery, which also stars Josh O'Connor, Jeremy Renner, Daryl McCormack and Cailee Spaeny, Brolin's small-town priest Monsignor Wicks is killed, with suspicion turning to one of his parishioners.

Writer-director Rian Johnson, also behind the earlier Knives Out movies, said he and Craig started talking about ideas for Wake Up Dead Man right after screening Glass Onion at the London Film Festival. “The idea of doing something a little more grounded seemed like it could be a good challenge, hopefully it's still funny, hopefully it's still entertaining and a really fun ride for audiences," he said.

Some 247 titles will feature during the 69th edition of the BFI London Film Festival, with famous names including George Clooney, Julia Roberts and Paul Mescal expected in town to promote their respective movies Jay Kelly, After the Hunt and Hamnet.

Also on the line-up are Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein, Emma Stone's latest collaboration with Yorgos Lanthimos, Bugonia, as well as Anemone for which Day-Lewis came out of retirement for his son's feature-film directorial debut.

Lanthimos and Day-Lewis will also take part in talks about their work alongside Zhao, who will discuss her Hamnet adaptation.

Forty-two percent of the works on the schedule were made by female or nonbinary filmmakers, organisers say. "We really want the programme to reflect the city that we're in so we're really looking for an enormous geographic diversity and we're also just looking for the programme to represent the world around us," London Film Festival Director Kristy Matheson said.

The London Film Festival runs until October 19.