Wake Up Dead Man
2025
Benoit Blanc is back in another “Knives Out Mystery.” Daniel Craig’s Foghorn Leghorn detective will once more hit Netflix on December 12th, but the film is in select theatres now (and it’s a confounding selection of theatres, let me tell you). I saw the new movie—entitled Wake Up Dead Man—yes, with no comma— in Tunkhannock, PA this weekend. Writer/director Rian Johnson has once more proven his skill and breadth, giving us a third classic murder mystery set in the contemporary world. Each of the three Knives Out films has a unique feel and focus. The first was about class, the second about the 1%, and this one about Christianity in today’s culture.
I am always impressed when non-religious artists put out work that speaks accurately and insightfully about Christianity. (Mass comes to mind immediately.) Wake Up Dead Man is another of those films. It sets up two very different priests overseeing a very small flock in upstate NY. I don’t think it’s a real spoiler to say that the one priest is murdered and the other works with Blanc to figure out how and why.
Rian Johnson “used to be very, very Christian,” according to his own account, and the fact that someone who chose to leave the faith can present such a textured—and ultimately positive—view of the Church is a true and pleasant surprise. The murdered priest is belligerent and politically charged, and this helps the possible killers pile up, but the surviving priest (Josh O’Connor) never engages with political ideology. Instead, he believably struggles to explain the inexplicable to others: his love and devotion and trust in Jesus and how that changes his life and choices. He is not a perfect man nor a perfect Christian, but he stands on a firm foundation of the hard calling to love one’s enemies as Christ did. I found him to be truly inspirational in the way he could speak to each person in a language that they understood.
After the purposefully over-the-top celebrity opulence and endless cameos of Glass Onion, Wake Up Dead Man has a small, subdued cast without cameos, which would have proven distracting in this film’s world. That cast includes Craig, O’Connor, Glenn Close, Josh Brolin, Cailee Spaeny, Jeremy Renner, Thomas Haden Church, Dylan McCormack, Mila Kunis, Andrew Scott, and Kerry Washington. Brolin is despicable as the victim, and O’Connor is wonderful as our hero (if you can look at him and his ugly ears for two hours and twenty minutes). Graig dials back his Kentucky-fried folksiness to a more realistic level. The rest have small but compelling roles which they fill up as much as possible.
The film is lovely, with its perpetually rainy forest and grand stone church serving as the setting for most of the action. Despite a more subdued tone than the previous two films in the series, it manages to hold on to its signature humor. A film that can so deftly ricochet from bloody daggers to touching conversations about faith to frequent funny situations to procedural police-speak is a script that has been carefully and lovingly refined. This is that script. It keeps you guessing with lots of reversals and beautifully gets to the heart of what Christianity really is.