Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery

A Crisis of Faith in the Locked Room

I had started to wonder whether Rian Johnson could keep the *Knives Out* machine from turning into pure self-parody. After the glossy tech-bro sprawl of *Glass Onion*, the series was edging toward something too noisy, too eager to admire its own tricks. *Wake Up Dead Man* corrects course in a smart way: it drains the air out of the circus. Johnson drops us into the damp gothic chill of an upstate New York parish, where everything smells like wax and old paper and bad consciences. The mood is heavier, sadder, more intimate. Instead of champagne bubbles and billionaire mockery, the movie is chewing on spiritual rot, and it gets under the skin.



That shift works because the film doesn’t build itself around Benoit Blanc right away. Daniel Craig’s detective, still delightful, stays in the wings longer than usual. The real center at first is Father Jud Duplenticy, played by Josh O'Connor, a former boxer turned priest who seems to be holding himself together by habit more than conviction. O'Connor is excellent here. He never turns Jud into a stock "tormented priest." You can see the violence he’s trying to bury in the set of his shoulders, in the way he keeps making himself smaller, gentler, less dangerous than he once was. After punching a deacon, he’s been dumped at Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude, where he now answers to Monsignor Jefferson Wicks. Josh Brolin plays Wicks as a roaring right-wing zealot, all spit and certainty.



The movie’s real electricity lives in the clash between those two men, which almost makes the murder feel secondary. Wicks uses the pulpit like a stump speech and gathers a little court around himself, including Glenn Close’s deliciously rigid parish secretary. When he turns up stabbed inside a sealed stone caddy by the altar, Johnson gives the audience the locked-room puzzle they paid for. But he seems far more interested in the moral wreckage around it. There’s a superb scene where Jud and Wicks scrub obscene graffiti off a family mausoleum. Jud barely reacts outwardly, but O'Connor lets you feel the strain in his jaw as Wicks twists even this ugly little moment into another sermon about exclusion. That scene says the whole movie in miniature: religion can shelter people, or it can be used to bludgeon them.



I’m less convinced by every piece of the actual puzzle. The cast is so crowded that Jeremy Renner and Kerry Washington wind up gasping for room at the edges. Peter Bradshaw in *The Guardian* described the film as "a chocolate box: mouthwateringly delicious on the first layer and … well, perfectly tasty on the second," which feels about right. The mechanics occasionally force people into chess-piece behavior, and Johnson sometimes pushes the political satire a beat too hard. A recurring joke about a podcaster embodying modern toxic masculinity feels slightly stale, even if Daryl McCormack commits to it beautifully.

Still, the thing I keep carrying around is the sadness in Craig and O'Connor’s performances. Blanc is quieter this time, less flamboyant, almost mournful in the face of such mean-spirited damage. By the end, the pleasure isn’t really in learning how someone beat the locked room. It’s in watching Jud decide what kind of mercy he can still live with. *Wake Up Dead Man* understands that mysteries matter most when the secret underneath them actually hurts.