Wake Up Dead Man

Rated PG-13 • Netflix

Knives Out (2019) became a sleeper hit in theaters, making more than $300 million against a budget of $40 million. Netflix bought the rights, giving Rian Johnson, who writes and directs the franchise, a much bigger budget to create a sequel, Glass Onion (2022). Now the third installment, Wake Up Dead Man, has landed on the streaming platform.

The original film was a tightly constructed murder mystery with a cast of quirky suspects who all seem to benefit from the death of the family patriarch. But the quirkiest character was Detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), with what one character referred to as a “Kentucky-fried Foghorn Leghorn drawl.” In Wake Up Dead Man, Johnson keeps the tone as quirky as ever. But this time around, he tries to incorporate questions of faith into his whodunit.

The action in Wake Up Dead Man revolves around a small Catholic parish where a young priest, Father Jud (Josh O’Connor), has been sent. He’s supposed to rejuvenate the dying flock at Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude by bringing a positive outlook. The church’s current priest is Monsignor Wicks (Josh Brolin). Wicks is a hard-liner who preaches fiery sermons and seems intent on alienating newcomers.

When Wicks is murdered in an exceedingly mysterious manner on Good Friday, the police enlist the help of master detective Benoit Blanc.

All-star ensemble casts have become a signature of the Knives Out franchise, and Wake Up Dead Man is no exception. A small group of parishioners makes up the list of suspects, and they’re played by heavy hitters like Glenn Close, Jeremy Renner, and Andrew Scott.

With this film, Johnson gives the audience his version of a locked-room mystery. It seems that everyone in the small congregation had a motive to kill Monsignor Wicks, but it seems impossible that any of them could have had the opportunity. Johnson includes some tongue-in-cheek moments, when the movie acknowledges that this setup is a common trope in the whodunit genre.

Perhaps more significant than the actual mystery is Johnson’s exploration of religion in the film. It turns out Benoit Blanc has a distinct dislike for the Christian faith, launching into an atheistic rant about the violence, misogyny, and homophobia perpetrated by the church. Father Jud, who acts as Blanc’s sidekick in the investigation, serves as his foil in spiritual matters. The earnest young priest tries to convince the skeptical detective that there might be something to this whole Christianity thing.

Johnson has said Wake Up Dead Man is a personal film for him. He grew up in a conservative evangelical household but as an adult abandoned the faith. In this film, we see him examining the intersection of faith and politics, and the result isn’t surprising given his background. Johnson uses Wicks as a stand-in for those he considers bad religious leaders in the age of Trump—hateful, arrogant, and caring more about the culture war than they do about people. Jud is supposed to be one of the good guys who saves folks by teaching them to forgive their enemies. Johnson deserves some credit for attempting to allow various perspectives to have their say, but despite his upbringing he doesn’t understand the thing he’s writing about.

The movie portrays religious experience as a false dichotomy: It’s either about control or some subjective feeling. Don’t expect a theologically accurate explanation of the gospel. The religious sensibility of the film is also askew because these Catholics don’t talk or act like Catholics. The faithful of Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude have a wild-eyed fanaticism about them at odds with the church’s Gothic architecture. Johnson might have thought he was being fair in his approach to religion, but he doesn’t know enough about Catholics, or Christianity in general, to provide anything beyond left-wing caricature.

Sadly, this clichéd perspective on Christianity wasn’t the only disappointment. Wake Up Dead Man contains fewer bad words than previous installments, but some of the dialogue is more explicit than anything in earlier films.

In the end, this isn’t a terrible movie. But it has too many annoying aspects. The central murder was cleverly written, but Johnson adds a secondary hoax that in context is both nonsensical and a little sacrilegious. The more you think about the intricate crime, the dumber it gets. Benoit Blanc fans would do better by queuing up the original.