Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery: religion is the latest puzzle in Rian Johnson’s extraordinarily pleasurable whodunit

Rian Johnson’s Knives Out film series is a miracle of modern cinema. It’s no wonder stars sign up for comparatively small suspects or victim roles: Johnson always gives actors relishable lines. In his early films Brick (2005) and The Brothers Bloom (2008), Johnson recreated the chic of Hollywood noir in distinctive, contemporary context. He then shifted to science fiction with the ingenious Looper (2012) – complicated back-and-forth timelines are a recurrent feature in his cinematic universe – before accepting the as-it-turned-out poisoned chalice of Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017), the best-directed film in the sequel trilogy. In response to a fan backlash, Johnson quit that universe and created his own IP with Knives Out (2019), a wicked, smart ensemble piece which reinvigorated the slightly out-of-fashion classic whodunit.   

The film helped make way for Kenneth Branagh’s Agatha Christie revivals, TV projects like Only Murders in the Building (2021-) and Johnson’s own Poker Face (2023-2025) – and inspired Netflix to back an ongoing series of Knives Out mysteries. Every case requires different things of its genius detective, the curiously-accented, quietly impassioned Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) and each film has a different tone. Glass Onion (2022) incorporated the weirdness of 2020-22 into its world – so many film/TV series skipped the pandemic – and Wake Up Dead Man is the first mainstream feature explicitly set in the era of Trump II (with references to the ‘Department of Government Efficiency’) but comes at cultural-political crises in a similar mode to Glass Onion. So far, Blanc has looked into crime fiction and money, big tech and money and now religion and money. Every time, he combines intricate puzzle plotting with an Altman-esque tapestry of interdependent characters who embody an American institution. 

Wake Up Dead Man has a Catholic milieu because, as Johnson admits, the Roman church has that gothic thing down in a way even the most terrifying Protestant evangelicals can’t match. The film is set in Chimney Rock, a fictional insular township in upstate New York that features a cathedral-sized house of worship, a tomb designed to assuage a Poe-like terror of premature burial (impossible to get into without specialised equipment, easy to get out of with a light shove), and a splendidly murderable pastor, Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin). The case begins when Monsignor Wicks, a drunken tyrant, is stabbed during mass when only briefly out of sight of the congregation. Blanc, as ever, doesn’t show up until late in the day. Craig’s detective always cedes ground to a guest star – Ana de Armas, Janelle Monae. Now it’s the turn of Josh O’Connor, who gets a meaty role as a put-upon innocent surrounded by predators. O’Connor’s Father Duplenticy is a short-fused priest (an ex-boxer who killed a man in the ring) sent to Chimney Rock either as punishment or in the hope he’ll unseat Wicks.   

The Monsignor had inherited the parish from his grandfather, a billionaire who came to the priesthood late in life, after fathering Wicks’ mother (known in his personal mythology as ‘the harlot whore’). A flock of diehards, bound to Wicks by fear as much as faith, make perfect suspects, each with amusing, sinister or poignant tics: fanatic housekeeper (Glenn Close), turned-to-God science fiction writer (Andrew Scott), cellist chairbound by chronic pain (Cailee Spaeny), high-end lawyer (Kerry Washington) forced to be adoptive mother to a would-be MAGA politico (Daryl Mccormack), hulking handyman (Thomas Haden Church) and bitterly divorced doctor (Jeremy Renner).   

In the spirit of Catholic mystery writer G.K. Chesterton, Johnson uses an apparent dark miracle to inspire a debate about faith. The rational Blanc and the religious Duplenticy have different definitions of ‘mystery’, though if any form of fictional world bears the tell-tale marks of a creator it’s the classic whodunit, where every incident, object or person has a purpose which must eventually become apparent. In parallel with A Haunting in Venice (2023), the third of Branagh’s Poirot pictures, Wake Up Dead Man forces its sleuth to ponder a spiritual side of life which might not be compatible with carrying out his plot purpose as the man who finds all the answers.   

It’s darker in look and subject than the earlier films, but – like Craig’s obvious relish with Blanc’s improbable accent – Wake Up Dead Man remains extraordinarily pleasurable, a meal of brain food garnished with wicked wit. 

► Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery is in UK cinemas now.