"WAKE UP DEAD MAN" INVESTIGATES FAITH

A good nurse,  a good sister, and now a bad priest? Wake Up Dead Man, the latest Knives Out mystery, is in theaters right now and headed to Netflix on December 12th, 2025. This is one of those rare franchise films where many will say, “I love the first, but this is really the best one.” Its story is the most labyrinthine, and its puzzle, the most personal. This time around, the real mystery that Benoit Blanc is trying to solve is why Reverend Jud Duplencity believes that God is good, despite all the harm that is done in His name

The Reverend is played by Josh O'Connor (Challengers, The Mastermind), who is a treat to watch in every scene. 
He plays a troubled priest who works for an awful one, played by Josh Brolin (No Country for Old Men, Hail, Caesar!). They are locked in a battle over what the word “faith” means. What the slew of faith-based films we have seen in the last two decades often misses is that there are legitimate reasons for the word “faith” to mean different things to different people. Especially among the churched. One’s relationship to the word and idea of faith is one of the most personal and mysterious things in human experience. It has been too long since a populist film by a major studio has reckoned with that word in such a nuanced, powerful, and entertaining way. This is not because it is watered down by the director Rian Johnson (Knives Out, The Last Jedi) but because it’s honest about church, faith, politics, and mystery. All shot by the greatest cinematographer since Roger Deakins. 

Steve Yedlin (Knives Out, Brick) is a master of digital film conversion and oft-discussed as such. But his ingenuity when it comes to practical lighting effects is his real secret weapon. Nerds may remember his brilliant window-strut light from the 1st film, creating the reflections of a window in Jamie Lee Curtis’ (Halloween, Everything Everywhere All at Once) glasses. This time, Yedlin was able to rig multiple sets with a 360 lighting rig, leading to one moment that extracted a gasp out of me, seeing something new I’d never thought of as missing from films before. Having done a few tours of duty working in churches, Wake Up Dead Man evokes and interrogates the experience of the spaces as much as it does the social life. 

Few people gossip more than the in-crowd of a Christian fellowship — it’s the natural outcome of a culture that holds personal failure as a key tenet of belonging. Managing this urge is a main responsibility of whichever pastor or priest heads that church, and Brolin’s priest, Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (great name), has abused it in a way all too familiar to those who have grown up in Church. His congregation has shrunk, but his influence on a few loyal attendees has only grown. Glenn Close (101 Dalmations, Mars Attacks) is a loyal secretary. Kerry Washington (Django Unchained, Scandal), Jeremy Renner (Avengers, Tag), Andrew Scott (Blue Moon, Fleabag), Cailee Spaeny (Civil War, Priscilla), Thomas Haden Church (Spider-Man 3; Easy A), and Darul McCormack (Twisters, Good Luck to You, Leo Grade) make up the regular attendees and tithers. 

Churches are strangely social businesses led by men with no training in business. If you labor in one, you’ll participate in never-ending discussions on why they bleed a certain type of customer/attendee - young people. Sexual, structural, and political reasons aside, what pastors and parents often forget is that if you grow up in a church, returning to it is like going back to a high school reunion every weekend. Most people just don’t want to do that, especially in their 20s. This is very much a cast of characters who choose that, and Johnson leverages that idiosyncratic choice to help you believe the assortment of the rich and powerful weirdos attending this backwoods cathedral. 

The canon of Catholic-guilt is as old as Cinema itself. The Ex-vangelical canon is still being built. This will be one of its best entries in both and probably the most fun. Brolin chugs along in his Coen-comedy gear, O’Connor gets great laughs as a priest who can’t get out of his own way, and McCormack’s performance is deceptively subtle in the political targets he loudly lampoons. Like the mystery itself, Daniel Craig’s third performance as Benoit Blanc is the least essential to its plot, but the most moving in the way it supports the other performances, and the most comedic in its styling. 

I do not know if Wake Up Dead Man is my favorite Knives Out yet. But I do know that it is the greatest accomplishment of the three, and an evolution of the Rian Jonshon project. 

Final Score: 5/5