Review: ‘Wake Up Dead Man’ is a faithful, crowd-pleasing whodunit
2025 / Dir. Rian Johnson
☆ 4/5
Watch if you like: Knives Out, Glass Onion, or basing your entire personality on your “harlot” mother’s failure to find your grandfather’s money and then making everyone else suffer for it.
If Glass Onion felt a bit too sunny for you, director Rian Johnson’s third Knives Out film Wake Up Dead Man injects a jab of gothic mystery and a surprisingly thoughtful depiction of the power of faith to reinvigorate the modern whodunit series.
Though Daniel Craig is as fun as ever as Benoit Blanc, the eccentric private detective dropped into the modern world, this is Josh O’Connor’s show as Jud Duplenticy, an earnest priest with a checkered past. Not quite able to shake his past as a boxer, Reverend Jud is shipped off to a menacing parish in a small upstate New York town after accidentally punching an annoying church deacon in the face. O’Connor’s character is the light of the film, and the most realized. He’s a man both struggling with past tragedy while wanting to do good in the world, in over his head while trying to remain calm and composed.
His desire to help out a struggling parish runs straight into Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin), who—when he’s not inundating Reverend Jud with the minute details of his self-pleasure sin—is actively alienating everyone in the town other than those most devoted to, or beaten down by, his fire-and-brimstone sermons centered around Wicks’s “harlot whore” mother. As tensions rise leading up to the Easter service between Jud and Wicks over the future direction of the church, an “impossible” murder occurs, casting suspicion on Jud and the other members of the church. Good thing Benoit Blanc shows up just in time to make sense of the chaos!
With now several mysteries under his belt, Johnson knows the genre inside and out. He understands why we return to detective mysteries over and over again, and how to keep the twists and turns trickling in. Even if this film’s extended cast—Glenn Close, Mila Kunis, Jeremy Renner, Kerry Washington, Thomas Haden Church, etc.—don’t all get as much screen time or much to do, there’s still a joy of interrogating all these ridiculous and hilarious characters.
Taking up most of the space is the Holmes-and-Watson parrying of Reverend Jud with Benoit Blanc: the believer and the skeptic. Apart from an impressive dialogue in the church about the necessity of storytelling when it comes to faith, thankfully Wake Up Dead Man lets both men be who they are without interrogating who is right or not. Instead, they balance out each other’s strengths, with Benoit learning grace and Jud harnessing his strength without losing control.
Woven between the genuine hilarity, fun twists, and goofy characters is a touching testament to faith and a sharp dissection of what’s gone wrong with faith in modern society. Monsignor Wicks’s religious message is full of cruelty designed to grow his cult of personality centered around his personal grievances. Cy Draven (Daryl McCormack) is a caricature of a conservative grifter who hopes harnessing Wicks’s message can help restart his failed political career when in fact he believes nothing. Simone Vivane (Cailee Spaeny) donates all her money to the church hoping it will heal her disability. Martha Delacroix (Glenn Close, in a very fun role) is dogmatic to a fault in upholding church tradition.
The Reverend Jud’s message of hope and repositioning the church to support its community feels totally alien in a world where religion is too often cudgel of misplaced anger and greed. While it’s not subtle in some of its characters or message, wanting a world where we care for each other can feel revolutionary—particularly when coming from a crowd-pleasing mystery.