Benoit Blanc Takes up God in ‘Wake Up Dead Man’

“It is time for Benoit Blanc’s final checkmate over the mysteries of faith!” The game’s afoot once again in Rian Johnson’s holy whodunnit Wake Up Dead Man (in theaters now and streaming on Netflix Dec 12), as sly private eye Blanc (Daniel Craig), the southern Sherlock with the Foghorn Leghorn cadence, brings his secular logic to a very Catholic murder. So too does Johnson bring his puzzle-teasing mind to bear in the house of the Lord, whipping up the third and most earnest Knives Out film to date — one still ripe with satiric jibes, but also quietly serious about the spiritual anguish that eats at the human heart.

Wake Up Dead Man
★★★★ (4/5 stars)
Directed by: Rian Johnson
Written by: Rian Johnson
Starring: Daniel Craig, Josh O’Connor, Glenn Close, Josh Brolin, Mila Kunis, Jeremy Renner, Kerry Washington, Andrew Scott, Cailee Spaeny, Daryl McCormack, Thomas Haden Church
Running time: 144 mins

Embodying the film’s soulfulness is Reverend Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor), an endearingly guileless man of the cloth — “young, dumb, and full of Christ,” he jokes — who gets transferred to a small parish in small-town Chimney Rock, New York, called Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude.

Overseeing that congregation is the handsome but overbearing Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin), the kind of fire-and-brimstone preacher who instills fear and loathing in his sheepish flock. Everyone is scared to death of the pugilistic Wicks, whose radically conservative view of the world inspires walkouts among the unbelievers and even more devotion from the remaining — and cowering — faithful.

Among his cowering sycophants is the elderly Martha Delacroix (Glenn Close), his most devout follower and the parish administrator, who years ago as a child witnessed Jefferson’s wealthy grandfather Reverend Prentice Wicks (James Faulkner) die at the altar. She also saw how none of his fortune went to Jefferson’s floozy mother Grace (Annie Hamilton), the so-called “harlot whore” who went on a rampage and almost killed Martha. And the secret of where that money went was buried with Wicks in an imposing tomb that looms near the church grounds.

Also in the brooding brood: Dr. Nat Sharp (Jeremy Renner), a heartbroken drunkard ever since his wife left him; washed-up sci-fi author Lee Ross (Andrew Scott); flinty Wicks family lawyer Vera Draven (Kerry Washington); failed social-media influencer Cyrus Draven (Daryl McCormack), Vera’s glum adopted son; and Simone Vivane (Cailee Spaeny), an affluent but former cellist who now needs a wheelchair to get around.

They all bear witness when the menacing monsignor, during a Good Friday service, darts into a side room and ends up dead — face down in a puddle of his own blood, a dagger in his back. Duplenticy, who, in an earlier heated exchange that went viral, accused Wicks of poisoning the church, is the main suspect. But celebrity sleuth Blanc, brought to the scene of the crime by local police chief Geraldine Scott (Mila Kunis), has his doubts. “You’re not a guilty man in torment,” he observes, “but an innocent man tormented by guilt.”

So begins a series of promising deductions, false conclusions, red herrings, and enough tantalizing clues to fuel this latticework of leads right up to a Lazarus-worthy third act of resurrection, betrayal, tragedy, and redemption. The longest of all three Knives Out movies, Wake Up Dead Man is also the most sober, one whose religious framework Johnson takes seriously, if skeptically.

Even as “proud heretic” Blanc keeps insisting that he kneels at the altar of the rational, Duplenticy keeps refuting his clever hypotheses about the possible murderer as nothing but braggadocious irrelevance. “I don’t know, and I don’t care,” he tells the clever detective. As priest, his mission is not to settle scores but to save souls; not to fight the wicked but to serve them — and maybe just bring them to Christ.

After tweaking liberal millionaire narcissists in Glass Onion, Johnson returns to skewering MAGA-infused rhetoric in Wake Up Dead Man, which, like Knives Out, is populated with alt-right figures and conservative-tinged zingers. (“There’s G-O-D in DOGE,” snarks one social-media video title we see on screen.) The murder-mystery magpie also shows his work, name-checking dark novelists like Edgar Allen Poe, G.K. Chesteron, and Dorothy Sayers. He even has Blanc point out that this is a “locked-door” murder of the kind made famous in John Dickson Carr’s “impossible crime” classic The Hollow Man. “This is practically a syllabus for how to commit this crime!” says Blanc at one point when he sees the titles on the group’s book-club list.

Wake Up Dead Man is also Johnson’s darkest and most graphic mystery, with green-tinted reveals of skeletal remains and demonic blood-red wolf heads adorning murder weapons. And, as much as it toys with speculation about robot knife guns and RF-bursting remote controls, it slows down for a remarkable moment of quiet grief. During a fact-searching phone call with a local construction company, Duplenticy finds himself talking to an emotionally fragile receptionist named Louise (Bridget Everett) whose estranged mother is in hospice. There’s no time in the narrative for this kind of interruption, but the empathetic priest puts Blanc on hold to take the call into a separate room and talk at length about her plight. It’s a powerful reminder of human connection, patience, and kindness. You might even call it heavenly.