Wake Up Dead Man: Rian Johnson Delivers a Holy Gift for Mystery Lovers

By Thom Ernst

Rating: A

Allow me to set the scene of the crime for Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery..

Reverend Duplenticy (Josh O'Connor)—a former boxer shadowed by a lingering conscience and a cloudy history of violence—allows body-memory to trump self-control when he decks an obnoxious deacon.

Church bureaucracy, well-versed in the practice of damage control, moves with the stealth of a public-relations firm on high alert. Regardless of any mitigating circumstances that prompted the outburst, the church’s response is swift, and Duplenticy is exiled to a remote community congregation.

Josh O’Connor as Rev. Duplenticy and Daniel Craig as Detective Benoit Blanc

His new post, Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude, sits beneath a canopy of trees and small-town moral codes. It’s here he is placed under the authority of Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin) whose formidable reputation turns out to be entirely intact.

Wicks rules the parish with joyless conviction—through intimidation, judgment, and an enthusiasm for making others uncomfortable—often digressing into unnecessary detail about his own excesses as if daring anyone to object. His only unwavering supporter is Martha Delacroix (Glenn Close, offering a chill of self-righteous superiority reminiscent of Judith Anderson’s Mrs. Danvers in Hitchcock’s Rebecca). In short, Wicks is despicable, the kind of character mystery stories quietly nominate for sacrifice.

So, when Wicks steps into a storage chamber mid-service—visible to the entire congregation—and ends up dead in what appears to be an impossible locked-room murder, the parish suddenly has no shortage of suspects. And when Duplenticy discovers the body, he inadvertently places himself at the top of the list.

Enter Detective Benoit Blanc.

With Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, director Rian Johnson cements the Knives Out films as a true franchise. And ironically, after freeing himself from one of cinema’s largest, Daniel Craig promptly inserts himself into another in the character of Blanc.

In this third outing, Craig has settled nicely into his rich Southern drawl. His unwavering certainty is so ingrained in his character that if arrogance plays any part, it is well concealed within an easy and casual politeness.

But as Craig settles into character, Johnson once again shifts tone. Gone is the tea-cozy, family-mansion murder of Knives Out, and Wake Up Dead Man is a step away from the more elastic, playful stretches of Glass Onion (a film I enjoyed immensely despite its lukewarm reception among critics and fans).

Here, Johnson builds a different mood entirely: a towering cathedral of Gothic arches, giant spires, and an ensemble of suspects ranging from despicable to improbable, conniving to the suspiciously and conveniently alibied. The murder is impossible, the suspects, damnable.

From that dwindling congregation come the suspects: Martha Delacroix (Close), a disciple with unshakable devotion; the town doctor (Jeremy Renner), crushed by a failed marriage; a once-beloved author chasing redemption (Andrew Scott); a far-right, YouTube-loving political wannabe (Daryl McCormack); a lawyer (Kerry Washington) chasing her late father’s favour; a former cellist silenced by chronic pain (Cailee Spaeny); and, of course, every mystery lover’s favourite suspect, the groundskeeper (Thomas Haden Church).

Mila Kunis rounds out the cast as the police chief, exasperated by both an impossible case and Blanc’s unorthodox methods.

What rescues Wake Up Dead Man from being buried beneath its own mystery-comedy tropes is Johnson’s willingness to parade those tropes like familiar suspects—letting us recognize them before he bends them somewhere unexpected.

The genre already promises a kind of built-in delight: characters whose motives shift like tectonic plates, alibis that crumble on contact, “reveals” tucked within disguises, and a friendly duel of wits between the ensemble and Benoit Blanc. Johnson embraces all of this, yet threads through it a liveliness drawn from the church’s own catalogue of truths and myths, secular or otherwise.

The humour exists, but arises quietly from circumstance rather than punchlines. And at the centre stands Benoit Blanc, the soft-spoken Southern gentleman of crime-solving, the antithesis of James Bond. Johnson draws most of his inspiration from the Agatha Christie playbook but Craig’s Blanc, with his wry self-awareness and honey-thick drawl, might not be the parody of Hercule Poirot (or Inspector Clouseau) that some claim.

The film’s narrative twists and recalibrates with mischievous precision, keeping viewers engaged while steadily off balance. Irony aside, Wake Up Dead Man, the third in the enterprise, is a welcome treat: a perfect Christmas-season outing filled with stars, mischief, and mystery.

Johnson delivers a wicked satire on faith and fanaticism, a lively mockery of far-right politics cloaked in the sacred robes of a classic whodunnit. It’s feel-good entertainment with just enough spiritual cleansing to seal the deal.

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery is directed by Rian Johnson and stars Daniel Craig, Glenn Close, Jeremy Renner, Andrew Scott, Daryl McCormack, Kerry Washington, Cailee Spaeny, Thomas Haden Church and Mila Kunis.  In theatres now.