Even before Rian Johnson‘s much-anticipated third Knives Out mystery world premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival (as all of Johnson’s wily whodunits have), word was already out that this was a bit darker. After all, it’s right there in the title, “Wake Up Dead Man,” which doesn’t fuss about with the fact that as fun as these capers are, they’re still about murders. And Johnson himself didn’t shy away from that early buzz, telling the crowd assembled at the Princess of Wales Theater on Saturday night that, if “Knives Out” was a more cozy mystery and “Glass Onion” was a bigger, sunnier deconstruction of the genre, “Wake Up Dead Man” was his dip into more Edgar Allan Poe-tinged waters.
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It works, and it’s no big mystery why — Johnson knows his form and format, and delivers on it, playing with tone and message but never losing sight of why these stories are so damn entertaining to watch and unravel.
As ever, master detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) is joined by a murderer’s row (oh, are they now? let’s see) of big-name talents, though Josh O’Connor as young priest Jud Duplenticy steals the show as a terrified murder suspect who comes to partner with Benoit. Johnson has always been aces at casting, but he’s here given rising star O’Connor a special role: both dark and funny, desperate and in control. When the film really flips its tone about halfway through, O’Connor ably carries that twist. (And, no, we doubt any other young working actor could so winkingly deliver a line about being “young, dumb, and full of Christ” quite like the multi-faceted O’Connor.)
While we don’t see Benoit for the first half hour of the film — at just over two hours and 21 minutes, the film still moves at a zippy clip — audiences will be naturally inclined to do some clue-gathering in his stead, all the better to be on the same page as the detecting genius when he arrives. Aided by voiceover narration by Jud (in the form of a letter, and guess to whom!), we quickly learn the lay of the land: the young priest was called to the church after a rebellious youth as a brawling boxer, something called the Good Friday Murder has just occurred, and Jud is absolutely up his neck with weirdo potential baddies.
Newly shipped off to a small congregation in Chimney Rock, New York, Jud has spent the past nine months trying to navigate his way through some nutty church politics. (The film’s upstate setting recalls “Knives Out,” and is both cozy and sinister, grand old churches with giant marble crypts behind them will do that.) They’ve gotten a whole lot worse in the face of a shocking and seemingly unsolvable murder, which Benoit arrives to try to crack. Who else would so happily sign up to pick apart a “perfectly impossible crime”? And who wouldn’t back down as its elements get darker and deeper, grimmer and weirder?
The church’s head — Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin), please, not simply “Father Wicks” — inherited his grandfather’s calling and has spent the past few years bringing together a small, but very dedicated flock. All of them are suspects: longtime employee Martha (Glenn Close), her boyfriend and the church’s handyman Samson (Thomas Haden Church), pissy lawyer Vera (Kerry Washington), her wannabe political influencer adopted son Cy (Daryl McCormack), MAGA-ish author Lee (Andrew Scott), cuckolded local doctor Nat (Jeremy Renner), and the desperate former cellist Simone (Cailee Spaeny).
As the film winds on, we learn both the depth of the congregation’s commitment to Wicks and the discomfiting nature of his preaching. The product of a “harlot whore” mother (Annie Hamilton in flashbacks), Wicks has slowly gathered together a loyal cadre of fans who see value in his messaging, which is mostly concerned with keep undesirables very much out and leaning on the kind of God-fearing principles far too obsessed with the fearing part.
All of his favorites are somehow aggrieved by their lot in life, and Wicks’ firebrand ways appeal to their sense of justice and vengeance, even if none of their worries are rooted in anything all that real. Disinformation reigns supreme in their feedback loops, outsiders are bad, the old ways are best, and at least one of them earnestly asks, “What is truth?”
You can see where this is all going, though Johnson, who also wrote the film’s script, leans hard into the current-day, timely connections — if these people could start their own social media platform just to preach about Wicks they would, but for now, YouTube will have to do — before easing up the gas just a bit. These mysteries have always been about storytelling, what people share, what they don’t, and what they want to be seen for. Jud muses that lying isn’t really necessary, just leave out the the stuff that’s not true, and Wicks and his band of brainwashed rageaholics (Scott’s character has literally built a moat around his house) have taken that to wild, fervent ends.
How do you battle faith and belief? For someone like Benoit, so steeped in rationality, so happy to announce he’s a heretic while literally standing in a church, the question could not be harder to answer. Thankfully, Johnson and his cast are more than up for the task, guiding “Wake Up Dead Man” through all the requisite twists and turns, ups and downs, revelations and Revelations. Tales are spun and then immediately tied back up into knots, and its gothic drama provides a fresh new place for Johnson to play in his preferred genre.
As blunt as some of its contemporary inspirations might feel in the moment — though Cy’s hilariously awful love of posting and his horrifying YouTube account (complete with Wicks’ sermons about everything from “non-binary being non-godly” to “there’s GOD in DOGE”) — Johnson, Benoit, and Jud are more concerned with taking us through classic concerns and caveats. What does it mean to believe something that seems impossible, to see things no one else can, to draw connections between disparate things, and to tell stories about all of that? In the world of Knives Out, it’s a matter of both faith and entertainment, and it’s easy to get ecstatic about both.
Grade: B+
“Wake Up Dead Man” premiered at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. Netflix will release it in select theaters on Wednesday, November 26 and on its streaming platform on Friday, December 12.
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