Father Jud Duplenticy has been exiled to a new location – he did punch a deacon, cinedeservedly or not – where Monseigneur Jefferson Wicks leads a small band of obsessed parishioners. Jud is tasked with reining in Wicks and bringing more people to the church, but he rapidly sees the danger in the rhetoric of the charismatic priest. Indeed, he is soon on camera threatening to cut Wicks out of the church…

And then, during the Good Friday sermon, Wicks walks in a small alcove. The congregation all saw him enter. When Jud, who was continuing the service, hears a noise, he looks into the alcove and sees Wicks lying face down – on closer inspection, he has been stabbed in the back. Nobody entered the room however – so the only person who could have done it was Jud himself. Luckily, Benoit Blanc has other ideas…

Had to wait a bit for this one because a) none of my local cinemas bothered to show this for its brief cinematic room and b) I’ve been playing Christmas carols with my band most nights since it dropped on Netflix and finally I had a free night last night. I’ve been looking forward for this for ages – I loved Knives Out and I loved Glass Onion. Rian Johnson is the current master of filmed mysteries, both with these films and with Poker Face, but could he keep the quality up with this one.

Nope, he exceeded it. It’s easily the best of the three, and that’s saying something.

The plot is a complex one – there’s not just the impossible stabbing, but also… something else that is possibly a plot spoiler as it happens quite late in the narrative, so I won’t go into that. Needless to say, there’s a lot going on with plenty of things to be worked out by the viewer with clues hidden in plain sight – if in one case, you need to have pretty good eyesight to spot it. John Dickson Carr’s The Hollow Man is referenced – it even makes a few appearances – and the list of locked room solutions is used, not just to inform but also to give a little bit of a misdirect for those who know the list well. There are some other titles that get a nod too, one of which is wisely and effectively used early on, because that would have been a rubbish ending.

The performances are first rate, from Craig banishing all memory of grumpy Bond with the wonderful Blanc and Josh O’Connor proving to be a mesmerising lead character. Not sure I’ve seen him in anything beforehand but going to be keeping an eye out for his work in the future. Needless to say, the rest of the cast are fantastic too.

Tonally, it’s also very effective, from its presentation of religion to concerns about mass media and demagogues. I’m not a religious person, but the moment with the phone call – you’ll know the bit when you’ve seen the film – really got to me. It would have been easy to write a script just bashing the church, but presenting both sides in an even way is a much trickier thing to do. Another tricky thing is to make such a mystery with so many moving parts work visually without giving anything away, and, as I gather it from others, that worked pretty well.

I say pretty well, because I’m going to do a humble brag here, I spotted almost everything and worked out almost everything – there was a little something with the weapon and I wasn’t sure if there was an additional person involved in the whole thing. But everything was there to be worked out, everything was there to be deduced, just like a fine classic mystery. An example of the Grandest Game In The World and I loved playing it. And on top of that, this was a damn fine film too.

Although… Locked Door Mystery? Guess Blanc can’t be right about everything…