Sometimes, the old maxim holds true: The third time really is the charm. With Wake Up Dead Man, filmmaker Rian Johnson delivers the strongest and most compelling entry in his Knives Out series yet — a confident return to form after the clumsy, overwritten contrivances of Glass Onion.
A whodunit is only as effective as the impetus that sets it in motion. Here, the crime at the center of Wake Up Dead Man is cleverly conceived and patiently unraveled, unfolding with clarity and momentum. The writing is sharp, the plotting unpredictable, and the ensemble formidable. At the film’s emotional center is Josh O’Connor as Father Jud Duplenticy: a tattooed former boxer with a troubled past who enters the priesthood as an act of penance.
Johnson frames Jud as a walking question: Are we forever defined by our past sins, or can genuine transformation redeem us? Judging by how he is depicted throughout — profoundly selfless, altruistic to the point of exhaustion, and endlessly attentive to others’ suffering — the film’s moral architecture insists that growth is indeed possible.
Following a violent outburst at his previous parish — he punches a boorish deacon mid-argument — Jud is reassigned as assistant pastor to a rural Gothic church (the next alternative assignment might as well have been tutoring the Von Trapp children). The church itself, a minimalist 19th-century stone structure washed in white light and stained glass, immediately commands attention. Even Benoit Blanc, an avowed atheist who proudly labels himself a “heretic,” can’t help but admire it. “Isn’t this something?” he murmurs, visibly awed.
But the beauty is deceptive. From the moment Jud arrives, it’s clear the parish is rotting from within. Its head, Monseigneur Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin), delivers incensed sermons saturated with iconoclastic political rhetoric, framing modernity itself as an existential threat to faith. He radicalizes what remains of his embittered congregation, casting them as persecuted guardians of a vanishing moral order. Johnson, ever the online observer, draws unmistakably from contemporary evangelical politics, grafting the language and paranoia of Trump-era grievance onto Wicks’s fire-and-brimstone authoritarianism.
The result is mixed. Characters such as Lee Ross (Andrew Scott, best known as Fleabag’s “hot priest”) spiral into conspiratorial victimhood, muttering about “libtards” undermining the church. These internet-native flourishes recall the worst excesses of Glass Onion and briefly threaten to drag the film into the same smug register. Mercifully, they are deployed more sparingly here and never fully derail the narrative.
It is during a Good Friday sermon that Wicks is mysteriously murdered, prompting the long-awaited arrival of Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc. Craig comes into form nearly halfway through the film, his refined Southern drawl finally settling into something that feels natural rather than sardonic. As Blanc begins methodically assembling the puzzle, the church’s buried history comes into focus.
Thematically, Wake Up Dead Man echoes John Steinbeck’s The Pearl in its treatment of wealth as a corrupting force. A long-lost Wicks family fortune, rumored to have resurfaced, becomes the gravitational center of the mystery. Each character’s relationship to the money reveals his or her moral posture: some seek to destroy it to neutralize its corruptive power, others to wield it to satisfy a host of material desires.
Johnson’s handling of faith is notably restrained. Raised devoutly Christian himself, he has spoken openly about the skepticism that replaced belief in adulthood, and that skepticism is voiced repeatedly through Blanc, who bluntly declares, “God is a fiction.” Yet, the film resists cheap mockery. Faith is not presented as delusion, nor is disbelief portrayed as fedora-donning enlightenment.
Appreciably avoiding the obvious narrative temptation of a redemptive conversion for Blanc, the film takes a more considered approach. Blanc learns from Jud. In one of the film’s most poignant scenes — which I will not do the disservice of divulging in detail — Blanc forgoes the most satisfying moment for any detective: publicly revealing the identity of the killer. Instead, in an unmistakably Christian gesture, he offers the guilty party the opportunity to come forward on their own account.
Johnson has said the screenplay was inspired by his own struggle to extend grace in an era of constant outrage. “Only good can come out of loving and forgiving your enemy,” he explained, lamenting how social media cultivates reflexive anger instead. The sentiment is sincere and largely earned. Where the film stumbles is in how those online fixations occasionally bleed into character dialogue, flattening complexity into meme-adjacent shorthand.
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The only casting misstep is Mila Kunis as the local police chief. Whether it is typecasting or a lack of authority in her screen presence, the performance never convinces. She spends much of the film trailing Blanc and insisting, doggedly and unimaginatively, that Father Jud be arrested simply because he was closest to the body. It is a minor distraction in an otherwise tightly controlled ensemble.
Ultimately, Wake Up Dead Man is a clever, thoughtful murder mystery that treats faith with unexpected generosity and seriousness. It suggests that institutions can fail without belief itself being fraudulent — and that forgiveness remains a difficult but necessary virtue. For his next mystery, Johnson would do well to follow his own advice: get offline and stop scrolling.
Harry Khachatrian (@Harry1T6) is a film critic for the Washington Examiner‘s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a software engineer, holds a master’s degree from the University of Toronto, and writes about wine at BetweenBottles.com.
