When Rian Johnson’s Knives Out first hit theaters, it wasn’t just a clever whodunit with an all-star ensemble cast. It was the birth of a new franchise, and an instantly iconic sleuth in Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc. With his Foghorn Leghorn-esque accent, eccentric sense of style, and undeniable charisma, Benoit Blanc swaggers his way through Knives Out and its sequel Glass Onion as the mysterious yet undeniably charming sleuth.
But in Johnson’s latest Knives Out mystery, Wake Up Dead Man, it isn’t just the murder suspects who are put under a microscope and scrutinized. Through Josh O’Connor’s Father Jud, and the setting of a small-town Catholic church, Rian Johnson unearths previously undiscovered layers of Benoit Blanc. As a result, this film delivers a poignant, personal story about the complex relationship between queerness and Catholicism.
Wake Up Dead Man sets a record for the latest Benoit Blanc is introduced in a Knives Out film. (It takes more than half an hour before the dapper detective waltzes into the picture.) Instead, the opening act of the murder-mystery follows Josh O’Connor’s Father Jud Duplenticy. He’s an earnest young priest from Albany and former boxer who willingly divulges to Blanc and his parishoners that he killed a man in the ring when he was 17.
Though Jud has dedicated his life to serving Christ, he still has violent impulses. We learn this in the opening beats of the film as Jud pleads his case in front of a probationary council for punching a deacon who said something “way out of line.” By Jud’s own admission, he’s struggled with addiction, anger, and homelessness, but following Jesus has set him on a new path.
When a priest at the probation hearing tells Jud that “A priest is a shepard, the world is a wolf” and that the Church “needs fighters, but to fight the world, not ourselves,” Jud immediately disagrees, emphatically insisting that if “You start fighting wolves, before you know it, everyone you don’t understand is a wolf.”
Deeply flawed but genuinely seeking salvation through service, Father Jud represents everything a priest should be: forgiving, honest, thoughtful, and perpetually open-hearted. Jud’s empathetic approach to ministry is what catches the attention of Bishop Langstrom (Jeffrey Wright), who assigns him to serve as assistant pastor to Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin), whose flock of parishioners is (in Langstrom’s own words) “shrinking and calcifying.”
Though Jud doesn’t initially understand why Langstrom is sending him to Wicks’ parish in Chimney Rock, it quickly becomes clear: Monsignor Wicks is a cruel, vindictive man, who leads his Church with an iron fist. The diametric opposite of Jud, Wicks is cold and calculating. He crafts his sermons to single out new attendees (the film depicts a single mother, a gay couple, and a woman wearing a face mask) and preaching increasingly hateful, incendiary rhetoric until the newcomer gets up and walks out.
Wicks isn’t interested in helping parishioners find Christ, he’s interested in growing his power and keeping them under his thumb. He views Jud’s earnest desire to help the parishioners of Chimney Rock heal as a threat to his fearmongering ministry. Wicks sees Jud’s kindness and exploits it, pushing and pushing until Jud finally reacts with violence, which is what he first came to the church to get away from.
Even in death, Father Jud reflects, Wicks has still won: deep down, there’s a hateful part of Jud that’s glad Wicks is dead. He may be dead and buried, but the mythology he’d built around himself, the cruel, fearsome persona, has latched on to Jud and the rest of the parishioners. Wicks has taught his parishoners to hate and driven Jud to violence, prompting the rest of the world to blame him for Wicks’ murder and label him the “Killer Priest.”
The young priest with a dark, violent past would be the perfect fall guy for Wicks’ killing. But just like Marta Cabrera from Knives Out was a good nurse and Helen Brand from Glass Onion was a good sister, Father Jud is a good priest. So he does what a priest should: he gets on his knees and prays.
And, lo and behold, seconds after Jud asks Jesus to show him a path to absolution, in waltzes Benoit Blanc. As we know, Blanc is an out and proud gay man, who lives happily with a husband (played by Hugh Grant). He spends his free time blasting “Skimbleshanks the Railway Cat” and playing Among Us with Angela Lansbury. But while Blanc may be memorable due to his many eccentricities, the first two Knives Out films don’t offer much in the way of insights into who Benoit Blanc is behind closed doors.
Benoit Blanc isn’t changed by these mysteries. He’s the one doing the changing, guiding the likes of Marta, Helen, and now Jud to uncanny revelations hidden in plain sight. But Wake Up Dead Man is set in a church. Both Jud and Blanc acknowledge that there is an undeniable emotional potency present in a chapel, whether or not you’re religious. It’s impossible to be in a church in not feel *something*, and when Jud asks Blanc what he feels, Craig’s usually calm, collected detective cracks.
Blanc launches into a passionate speech about the hypocrisy of the church, an institution he believes is riddled with “malevolence and misogyny and homophobia.”A self-professed “Proud Heretic,” a gay man raised in the American deep South by a “very, very religious” mother, Blanc sputters to offer more details on his religious upbringing beyond “it’s complicated.”
But for any LGBTQ+ viewer raised in a religious household, it’s not difficult to put the pieces together. It’s an eerily familiar scene, struggling to explain the complex web of emotions of being brought up in a religion that preaches love and forgiveness but practices hate.
The brief but immediate exchange between Jud and Blanc feels unquestionably like the most the suave sleuth has ever been put under the microscope in a Knives Out film. And the raw, open emotional vulnerability immediately established between the priest and the detective is a dynamic that the ideological foundation Wake Up Dead Man is built on.
As a detective, Blanc can offer Jud absolution in the eyes of the law, to clear his name and find Wicks’ true killer. But we also spend Wake Up Dead Man watching Blanc watch Father Jud: how he interacts with parishioners, how he reacts to a dead body, the kindness and grace he offers to anyone he encounters.
When Blanc first arrives on the scene in Wake Up Dead Man, he gleefully assures Jud and the local police that he always catches his killer in a triumphant moment of checkmate where he “takes the stage” to deliver a final blow. But when the time comes for him to do so in Wake Up Dead Man, Blanc, instead, opts to follow in Father Jud’s example, and choose a different path.
Make no mistake, Benoit Blanc isn’t converting to Catholicism. Jud invites him to his first mass at the newly renamed Our Lady of Perpetual Grace, but Blanc cheerily assures him there’s “nothing he’d rather not do.” But for Blanc, it’s the extension of the offer, the invitation to community, that matters. It’s written plainly on the message board outside: “All are welcome.” Blanc doesn’t end the film a Christian. He doesn’t even stay for mass.
But nonetheless, as he puffs his cigar and waltzes off into the sunset and towards his next case, we’re left with the feeling that Blanc has been undeniably changed by his time in Chimney Rock. There is love and grace to be found in the church. Father Jud is living proof of it, and seeing the young, troubled, but relentlessly hopeful priest tend to his flock with grace in the face of cruelty inspires Blanc, in turn, to have grace for his enemy.
Instead of relishing in his moment of triumph, Blanc cedes his final “whodunit” speech in favor of allowing a broken but profoundly pious soul the opportunity to seek forgiveness in the loving arms of their priest. Wake Up Dead Man’s killer is the walking embodiment of bigotry, someone who undoubtedly reminded Blanc of his own, deeply religious, estranged mother. And yet he extends them an extraordinary kindness, following in father Jud’s example. Perpetual Grace.