Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery Review

Rian Johnson's third Benoit Blanc film trades the island for a stone church and the satire for something closer to faith. Josh O'Connor plays Father Jud Duplenticy, a former boxer sent to assist Josh Brolin's Monsignor Wicks, a firebrand who has preached his flock down to a loyal, bitter few. When Wicks is stabbed during the Good Friday service in what looks like a locked room, Jud is the obvious suspect, and Daniel Craig's Blanc, long haired and openly atheist, is the one man who believes him.

Johnson called it the hardest script he has written, and it shows in a good way. The case is a real impossible crime in the John Dickson Carr tradition, with Carr's The Hollow Man cited more than once, and the running argument between the priest who believes and the detective who does not gives the film a spine the second one lacked. O'Connor is funny and wounded at once, and Glenn Close, as the monsignor's devoted right hand, is a pleasure.

The cost is the suspects. Jeremy Renner, Kerry Washington, Andrew Scott, Cailee Spaeny and Daryl McCormack each get a trait rather than a character, and at 144 minutes the middle sags. It opened in select theaters on November 26, 2025 and reached Netflix on December 12.