Come On Up to the House: A Review of Wake Up Dead Man

One of the persistent pleasures of cinema is its ability to surprise. I would not, for example, have predicted that three of my favorite films from 2025 (28 Years Later, Sinners, and Weapons) would come from a genre (horror) to which I am typically allergic. And yet there they each sit on my annual Top Ten list, alongside more standard fare like Sentimental Value and One Battle After Another. These films unexpectedly clicked for me because they employ their genre trappings as a means for exploring much deeper themes—the transition into manhood, the relationship of art and commerce, the nature of suburban dread. The same can be said of the most surprising film of the year, Wake Up Dead Man, which uses the tried-and-true conventions of a whodunit murder mystery to undertake an examination of the true nature of the Christian faith.

The third installment in Rian Johnson’s Knives Out franchise, Wake Up Dead Man follows the trials of Father Jud Duplenticy (the pleasantly ubiquitous Josh O’Connor), a young Catholic clergyman who enters the priesthood after a troubled adolescence during which he kills a man in the boxing ring. Holy orders have not brought about a complete reformation in Father Jud, however, and after cold-cocking an officious deacon he is reassigned to the remote parish of Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude in upstate New York as penance. There, he finds a shrinking congregation under the sway of the domineering Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (the always incredible Josh Brolin). Having delighted in driving away other parishioners with fire-and-brimstone sermons targeting their specific moral failings, Monsignor Wicks is left with a small band of zealously loyal followers. These followers seem to embody many of the dysfunctions plaguing our society. A doctor whose family has splintered over a perceived lack of worldly success. A science fiction writer descending into the fever swamps of conspiracy. A cellist wracked with mysterious pain, willing to turn anywhere for relief. An aspiring politician seeking power via social media stardom. An elderly churchwoman whose piety does not prevent her from scorning those she deems less worthy. A lawyer who feels stifled by her filial obligations.

Father Jud and Monsignor Wicks are soon at odds. Father Jud insists that Jesus came to heal the world, not fight it as Wicks would do. Monsignor Wicks dismisses this as a sop, a “going along to get along” with a modernity intent on destroying the Church through its embrace of sin. This worldview is shaped by Wicks’s rejection of his late mother Grace, who he and parishioners refer to as “the harlot whore.” At her father’s insistence, Grace had raised the child Wicks at Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude despite her own life of greed and promiscuity. Upon reaching manhood and becoming head of the parish, Wicks refuses to replace a crucifix that Grace destroyed many years before while ransacking the church, so as to remind parishioners of her transgressions. So complete is Wicks’s obsession with sin, in other words, that he has literally banished Christ from his parish.

During a climactic confrontation on Palm Sunday, in an exchange caught on video, Father Jud tells Wicks that he will do whatever it takes to prevent Wicks’s further poisoning of the congregation. When Wicks is stabbed to death in a closet near the pulpit during a break in the Good Friday service shortly thereafter, suspicion centers on Father Jud.

Enter private detective Benoit Blanc (played by Daniel Craig, in his most interesting turn as Blanc to date), the protagonist of the Knives Out series. Blanc, who describes himself to Father Jud as “kneel[ing] at the altar of the rational,” represents a challenge to Jud’s theology from a secular direction. He dismisses religion as a fairy tale that he sees as filled with the usual flaws cited by critics of the Church—misogyny, homophobia, violence, cruelty, hypocrisy. Perhaps religion is storytelling, responds Father Jud. But maybe the stories “resonate with something deep inside us that’s profoundly true that we can’t express any other way.” For once, the normally loquacious Blanc is rendered largely silent. “Touché Padre” is all he can muster in response.

Blanc and Father Jud set about solving the mystery of how Monsignor Wicks came to be stabbed in a closet into which no one could have entered without being seen. And that mystery is a satisfying one. But its pleasures are secondary to the film’s consideration of the larger mystery of the Christian faith, as Father Jud himself dramatically illustrates. While frantically attempting to gather information that will lead to the killer, Father Jud encounters a woman who is suffering. He drops everything to comfort her, telling Blanc that the whodunit is a distraction from Father Jud’s life purpose: to serve even the wicked and bring them to Christ.

Revealing that Benoit Blanc ultimately gets his man or woman with or without Father Jud is not too much of a spoiler. But what follows is a minor one, so read no further if you want to go in fresh. Inspired by Father Jud’s example, Blanc untangles the mystery while showing the guilty party grace. And yet Blanc’s achievement still pales in comparison to the triumph that concludes the film: Father Jud, one year later, as pastor of the newly and very movingly renamed parish, restoring Jesus to his rightful place, front and center in the Church. Not too bad for a genre movie.