Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery

There is a delightful audacity in the way Rian Johnson begins Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery. Instead of introducing us to the franchise's beloved detective, the film opens by plunging us into the troubled psyche of Father Jud Duplenticy, played with extraordinary tenderness and volatility by Josh O'Connor. The film quickly reveals a complex character: a priest with the muscular physique of a former boxer, a past steeped in guilt over a death in the ring, and a sincere but fragile devotion shaped by penance. Jud Duplenticy's arrival at Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude, a neo-Gothic parish in upstate New York, sets the tone: this is the darkest film in the Knives Out saga to date, not only in terms of visual palette but also spiritual temperament. Rian Johnson uses the church, both its architecture and its rituals, as an arena of moral distortion and desire, transforming the closed-room whodunnit into a reflection on faith, fanaticism, and the stories we cling to for salvation.

At the center of this distortion is Monsignor Jefferson Wicks, played by Josh Brolin with volcanic intensity and a touch of wounded theatricality. In press notes, Rian Johnson describes Monsignor Jefferson Wicks as an apocalyptic demagogue, but on screen he becomes even more frightening: a man who uses Scripture as a weapon, who intimidates and seduces his dwindling flock with equal fervor. His confessions to Jud Duplenticy are grotesquely comical, grotesquely intimate, and grotesquely revealing; the Monsignor treats the sacrament less as absolution than as domination. Around him forms a congregation of misfits whose vulnerabilities he exploits: the embittered lawyer Vera Draven (Kerry Washington), the alcoholic Dr. Nat Sharp (Jeremy Renner), the fragile former child prodigy Simone Vivane (Cailee Spaeny), the conspiracy-theorist science fiction author Lee Ross (Andrew Scott), and the opportunistic influencer-politician Cy Draven (Daryl McCormack). And then there's Martha Delacroix, the keeper of the parish's secrets, played by Glenn Close, who embodies both Mrs. Danvers and the ladies of the church in a small town with a performance that is at once hilarious, disturbing, and, as the film progresses, surprisingly tragic.

When Monsignor Jefferson Wicks is murdered during a Good Friday service in what the press calls Rian Johnson's purest locked-room illusion to date, Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery enters its central phase of sleight of hand. The murder takes place before the eyes of the entire congregation, inside a sealed vault, using a weapon so theatrical that it seems almost mythical. Father Jud immediately becomes the prime suspect: covered in blood, filled with latent anger, present at the scene... Yet the film has already taught us to see him as both a sinner and a shepherd. It is here, at the 40-minute mark, that Daniel Craig finally makes his return to the franchise, and the impact is electric. His Benoit Blanc, with longer hair, a more pronounced accent, and a more provocative mustard-colored suit, enters like a man late for his own opera. Benoit Blanc is not so much the star as the axis around which everything revolves, and Rian Johnson builds on this idea: Benoit Blanc becomes a counterpoint to Jud Duplenticy rather than the gravitational center of the story.

Indeed, some of the film's most striking moments are found in the philosophical jousting between Jud Duplenticy and Benoit Blanc. Benoit Blanc approaches the world as a rationalist, while Jud Duplenticy's worldview is steeped in the language of redemption and grace. Yet neither man has the luxury of certainty. Rian Johnson constructs his mystery in such a way that logic and belief collapse under the weight of seemingly impossible events, including a moment that openly flirts with resurrection. Press notes point out that Johnson grew up in a religious family and that this film was the most difficult for him to write, precisely because he wanted to treat faith seriously, without condescension or dogmatism. This tension animates every scene between Josh O'Connor and Daniel Craig: their performances function like two instruments in a dissonant harmony, one rooted in seriousness, the other in skepticism, and this friction makes the film's emotional stakes surprisingly high for a genre that so often relies on irreverent humor.

That's not to say Rian Johnson abandons the pleasures of the Knives Out universe, far from it. His signature humor shines through, particularly in the metatextual jabs that pepper the dialogue (Lee Ross, played by Andrew Scott, lamenting the spectacle of the investigation, quips that a silly version of us will end up on Netflix). Yet even the comedy is integrated into the characters' psychology rather than superimposed. Martha, played by Glenn Close, appears in doorways like a gothic specter; Renner's despair masks a loneliness that the film does not ridicule; Simone, played by Cailee Spaeny, embodies a sincere and heartbreaking belief in miracles. Even the subplot involving Eve's Apple, the oversized cursed diamond at the heart of the Wicks family legend, has an almost fairy-tale resonance, symbolizing hereditary sin, corrosive greed, and the stories families tell to justify cruelty.

Visually, the film is a triumph. Director of photography Steve Yedlin bathes the church in cold stone-gray tones, interrupted by supernatural rays of light, and stages Jud Duplencity's memory sequences with expressionistic flourishes: fists echo in empty darkness; hymns turn into funeral dirges; the church's corridors stretch like the corridors of the subconscious. Rick Heinrichs' art design transforms Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude into a character in its own right, a place where piety and decadence coexist, where the architecture itself seems to conspire in half-truths. Johnson's meticulous structure, always aware of the classic mechanisms of the genre and always ready to subvert them, uses this universe to blur the line between human intrigue and divine ambiguity. The film seems indebted to Edgar Allan Poe in its sense of lingering terror.

If Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery was a sunny farce and Knives Out a lively autumnal puzzle, Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery is winter: raw, icy, and throbbing with the pain of moral exhaustion. It's not the funniest installment in the saga, nor the most daring structurally, but it is the most memorable. Its heart belongs to Jud Duplencity, a man desperately trying to be good, to rewrite the violence of his past, to offer others the grace he doesn't fully grant himself. Josh O'Connor's performance is revealing, effortlessly oscillating between burlesque physicality, moving confessions, and flashes of the boxer he once was. His chemistry with Craig is wonderful: Benoit Blanc's flamboyant confidence softens in Jud Duplencity's presence, as if the detective too feels the pull of something greater than deduction.

As Benoit Blanc gathers the suspects, delivering his denouement from a literal pulpit in one of Rian Johnson's funniest and most thematic images, the solution feels less like a triumph of intellect than an act of storytelling that restores the possibility of grace. Rian Johnson's script, dense with clues and twists, ultimately resolves itself not through shock, but through moral clarity. In its final moments, the film offers something rare for a crime thriller: a reflection on what justice means beyond punishment, and what healing might require in a fractured community.

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery
Written and directed by Rian Johnson
Produced by Ram Bergman, Rian Johnson
Starring Daniel Craig, Josh O'Connor, Glenn Close, Josh Brolin, Mila Kunis, Jeremy Renner, Kerry Washington, Andrew Scott, Cailee Spaeny, Daryl McCormack, Thomas Haden Church
Cinematography: Steve Yedlin
Edited by Bob Ducsay
Music by Nathan Johnson
Production companies: T-Street Productions, Ram Bergman Productions
Distributed by Netflix
Release dates: September 6, 2025 (TIFF), November 26, 2025 (United States), December 12, 2025 (Netflix)
Running time: 144 minutes

Seen on December 12, 2025 on Netflix

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