Nov. 26, 11:10 am UTC • 7 min Movies Movies ‘Wake Up Dead Man’: The ‘Knives Out’ Franchise Finds Religion Rian Johnson’s latest is a faithful addition to the series, taking on big ideas and featuring a standout performance from Josh O’Connor Netflix/Ringer illustration Nov. 26, 11:10 am UTC • 7 min Playing an idealistic but anxious young priest in Rian Johnson’s Wake Up Dead Man, Josh O’Connor furrows his brow and angles his lanky body into a prizefighter’s stance. His character, Jud Duplencity, is a former boxer with an accidental in-ring death on his conscience—shades of Jason Miller’s Father Karras in The Exorcist, another flawed man of the cloth who battered the heavy bag in between encounters with Pazuzu. There’s something potent in O’Connor’s posture as a spiritual warrior, especially one who struggles with impulse control. As the film opens, we learn that Jud has been transferred to an isolated parish in upstate New York, a punishment for swinging at a colleague and also a test of resolve. Walking through the grayed-out grounds of Our Lady of Perpetual Grace, Father Jud looks more resigned than excited; his hands are down, and his guard is up. There are plenty of reasons, it seems, to be defensive. Jud’s new boss, the notorious Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin), is an expressly pugilistic sort of preacher—a heavyweight who likes to throw haymakers from the pulpit and hit below the belt in person. His arsenal includes all kinds of cheap shots, to which Jud is inclined—and duty bound—to turn the other cheek, especially since the members of the monsignor’s flock seem inured to being on the receiving end of such two-fisted religiosity. Wicks isn’t just the ruling authority at the church. He was born into its leadership and lords over the premises accordingly. He’s more inclined to lash out at his followers than mollify them, and there are plenty of sore points among them to jab at: The regulars include a philandering, alcoholic physician (Jeremy Renner); a stifled sci-fi writer (Andrew Scott); a wheelchair-bound musician (Cailee Spaeny); a sleek lawyer saddled with family shame (Kerry Washington); and an ascendant alt-right influencer (Daryl McCormack). Netflix It’s a motley bunch, united by a feeling of being on the short end of the stick. Their resentment places them in thrall to Wicks’s Old Testament persona, which is big on apportioning blame and doling out suffering. This servile dynamic goes double for Martha (Glenn Close), who, like the monsignor, is a long-tenured (and personally invested) member of Our Lady of Perpetual Grace and whose loyalty in the face of so much hateful eye-for-an-eye rhetoric hints that she’s less benevolent than she lets on. Cue the impending 12-round title bout between the reigning champ and the no. 1 contender for the right to spread the good word through Albany and beyond. Jud may be overmatched, but he’s willing, at least, to go down swinging. And then, suddenly, Wicks takes a dive; he’s dispatched by an unseen assailant during a Good Friday sermon in a way that beggars belief for superstitious and secular types alike. The circumstances of his death are so strange, in fact—stabbed in the back in a closet with no access point—that they prompt national media attention. The cops, it goes without saying, are baffled; it falls to Jud, who was standing onstage in full view of the churchgoers at the moment of truth—a position that seemingly places him beyond suspicion, despite his obvious motive—to sort through the confusion of the case and his own interlacing sensations of guilt and gratitude that somebody has gone and taken a false and probably dangerous prophet out of the picture. It’s at this point in Wake Up Dead Man—about 45 minutes into its leisurely two-and-a-half-hour running time—that Benoit Blanc arrives and drawlingly transforms the proceedings into a Knives Out Mystery: a format whose familiarity breeds (streaming) content. Where previous installments suggested Johnson’s gift for pretzel-like convolution—a carryover from his virtuosic pocket-noir debut, Brick—entry no. 3 demonstrates his riskiest and most sophisticated play with structure and audience identification. It takes guts to not only delay the arrival of Daniel Craig’s star detective but also then consign him, more or less, to sidekick status—like Sherlock Holmes cosplaying as Dr. Watson. The point is not that the franchise needs less of Benoit Blanc: He’s a wonderful character, played by Craig with considerably more buy-in than he brought to the last couple of Bond outings. It’s more that Johnson’s self-contained murder-most-foul conceit is by now spacious enough to accommodate not only those rotating A-list ensembles but also varying approaches to world-building and storytelling. That this is probably the best of the Knives Out films speaks to its maker’s personal investment. In interviews, Johnson has said that crafting Wake Up Dead Man was more arduous than expected, owing in part to his own religious upbringing—a trickier proposition than crafting an airtight locked-room mystery à la John Dickson Carr. “The real reason the script was so hard to write," Johnson told Empire , “[is that] it’s [about] something I do take really seriously. I wanted to explore it in a really honest way, while also not being facile about it, or—God forbid—moralistic or irreverent.” The Many Mysteries of the ‘Knives Out’ Series Source: https://www.theringer.com/2025/11/26/movies/knives-out-wake-up-dead-man-netflix-review