Confession time here, folks. I didn’t really enjoy Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery that much. Like, it’s pretty good, I liked a lot of the performances, but compared to Knives Out, which I watched like five times, Glass Onion just felt kinda…dumb. I immediately began to worry about the future of Rian Johnson’s Benoit Blanc whodunit series with Netflix involved. More money means more room for going overboard. Still, I reserved the right to go into the third film, Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery with the hope it would feel more like the original. It absolutely does. I loved it to bits.
There’s a reason so many people like the cozy mystery formula. It’s cozy! We like to settle in with a whodunit, a compelling cast of characters, a charismatic, often quirky investigator, and leave feeling satisfied. One of the reasons I didn’t vibe as much with Glass Onion is that lavishly wealthy people on a private island in the sunny ocean does not scream “cozy” to me. Whodunits need to be clever, but go too clever, and it becomes cutesy. Wake Up Dead Man thankfully leaves much of the cutesiness behind, giving us a murder mystery that assumes you’ve watched or read a ton of these, but finds new wrinkles along the way.
This story of Wake Up Dead Man takes us to Upstate New York. Josh O’Connor plays Fr. Jud Duplenticy, a young priest and former street tough who desperately wants a parish to enrich. The archdiocese places him as the junior pastor at Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude, a small church led by the fire-and-brimstone Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin). Instantly, the Monsignor takes a dislike to Fr. Jud, the interloper, and makes it increasingly difficult for him to make any inroads with the parish’s most devoted flock. Devoted, almost to a one, not because of intense faith but because of sycophantic devotion to Wicks.
The flock includes: Glenn Close as the church’s longtime secretary; Kerry Washington as Wicks’ lawyer; Jeremy Renner as a local doctor who struggles with alcoholism; Andrew Scott as a cult sci-fi writer who wants to write a book about Wicks; Cailee Spaeny as a musician with chronic pain; Daryl McCormack as a young, would-be far-right politician; and Thomas Haden Church as the laconic handyman. Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery brings you this eclectic group with, as you’d expect, much to hide.
After Jud calls Wicks out for his harmful rhetoric, the monsignor ends up dead, in a room where no one could have entered or exited without all of our characters seeing. Soon, Fr. Jud receives the blame, and town police chief Geraldine (Mila Kunis) calls in none other than the master sleuth himself, Benoit Blanc (Craig), to once again solve the unsolvable on Wake Up Dead Man.
As with the previous films in Johnson’s Blanc series, the bulk of the story rests on a different character, someone who can be both audience surrogate and eventual suspect. Here, it’s O’Connor’s Father Jud who gives the film earnestness and vulnerability. Even if some of the other characters behave archly, Jud never winks. He’s the emotional core of Wake Up Dead Man, which makes the uncertainty of his guilt all the more compelling. For a movie set within the world of church, religion, and faith, it’s Fr. Jud’s plight that feels true, badly searching for meaning and hope within perhaps the most cynical world imaginable.
Much of that cynicism is reflected in Monsignor Wicks. Brolin barrels his way through sermon after bile-filled sermon, needling his constituents until only the most indoctrinated remain. Johnson gives these scenes a mixture of humor and dread as, even in a movie such as this, they reflect the horribly fractious and mean-spirited world of 2025 America.
Craig continues his reign as the most watchable sleuth in the game, Benoit Blanc. Here, he and Jud have philosophical discussions about faith versus rationalism, and it works very well with Blanc’s Knives Out character. The movie isn’t religious or atheistic, but Johnson allows his characters to be one or the other without either side facing derision on Wake up Dead Man. Really, it’s just falseness that draws ire.
The standout visual elements of Wake Up Dead Man delve closer to a horror or ghost story than a mystery, which makes both pop. Old-timey Catholic churches and graveyards feel inherently spooky. The title also is not out of nowhere; whether or not a dead man rises is of the utmost import to the mystery. I think I inherently vibe with chilly autumnal rather than beachy summer, so I loved going back there for Wake Up Dead Man.
For me, the journey of Wake Up Dead Man feels far more emotionally resonant than we’ve seen yet from a Rian Johnson whodunit. I still think Knives Out is the best of the three, but I could see, after another few viewings, this one creeping up toward it. Craig, O’Connor, Brolin, and Close all give thunderously good performances, and the script is twisty and satisfying. I truly hope we get some more Benoit Blanc adventures because Wake Up Dead Man has fully restored my faith.
Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery hits Netflix December 12.
Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Letterboxd.