The Holy Trinity comes to Knives Out

Wake Up Dead Man (2025), the third installment in Rian Johnson’s Knives Out series, is that unicorn of a film that makes viewers laugh, cry, and sit forward in suspense. Audiences approach the film anticipating the quintessential murder mystery, and yes, it has its familiar flavors: the classic choir of suspects, the Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) witticisms and drawl, and a shocking plot twist. But Johnson adds some umami into the flavor profile, delivering a film that questions faith, contemporary religion, and guilt in an inoffensive, charitable way. 

In Wake Up Dead Man, the spotlight shines on our protagonist, Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor), a Catholic priest and ex-boxer with a dark and troubled past. He is assigned to a small parish in upstate New York under “Monsignor” Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin), a bombastic priest preaching Christian nationalistic rhetoric, fire, and puritanical guilt. He has a small coterie of diehard locals who both admire and fear him. Duplenticy and Wicks’s followers quickly become suspects when the small town unravels behind a classic locked-room mystery: a body is discovered in the church break room.

Brolin is absolutely brilliant from the get-go. The first half of the film is hilarious, with Brolin’s dry, ironic inflection being sublime. He goes into confession with Duplenticy and tells him about his ridiculous masturbation habits, mentioning how he “finished into a copy of Catholic Chronicle magazine.” But his range isn’t all crude humor. Brolin gives impassioned religious tirades: he is smug, selfish, and never hesitant, a natural demagogue. He preaches guilt and original sin, traumatized by his mother's lack of religiosity and “licentiousness.” He immortalizes her as the “Harlot Whore”—quite the name for a mother.

The film is also unafraid of commenting on contemporary culture and societal issues, even more so than earlier Knives Out films. Wicks’s approach comes into strict conflict with Duplenticy’s, who advocates for love and forgiveness, tormented by the guilt of accidentally killing someone in the boxing ring. The characters stand as foils to one another, but Johnson is opinionated in favor of a reformist, Pope Francis-adjacent worldview of forgiveness and tolerance. He undermines Wicks’s approach by portraying him as a worldly, selfish man who largely uses faith for his own gain. Done so against the backdrop of Christian nationalism across the globe, Duplenticy and Wicks personify a modern struggle between grace and dogma within the real church and politicized Christianity.  

The real soul of the film, though, is not this religious hullabaloo, but rather Duplenticy himself. The film is largely told through his eyes; he recalls the exposition of the town and his life, and we are as unaware of unfolding events as he is. The real appeal is O’Connor’s acting. He plays Duplenticy in a refreshingly authentic way, grappling with his guilt and struggling to find his path. Nonetheless, he is a paragon of grace: we see a scene at the height of his investigation with Blanc where he takes hours to pray for a woman whose mother has dementia. His eyes, the tears, and the emotion in his voice are just so powerful. It is a scene that offers a hopeful light on Christian faith for audiences who are accustomed to the overrepresented rhetoric of men like Wicks. 

In a way, the film manages to present faith in a balanced manner that is not pure criticism through Wicks, but also not in dramatized praise of Christianity. In one of the best scenes in the film, Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) speaks with Duplenticy in a church. Blanc admits to not being religious, offering a diatribe against organized religion in what can only be described as a Redditor’s fantasy, and Duplenticy offers his own personal, emotional opinion on faith in the form of a collection of stories, asking if Blanc believes the “story convinces him of a lie.” This scene is so powerful because it captures the nuance of faith in a modern era when its place is increasingly questioned. It is a modern take on what “faith” really means. 

It is not all highlights, though. The film’s momentum screeches to a halt at halftime; it could reasonably have been 30 minutes shorter if it had cut out some of the dialogue that got too verbose. While the film's introspection is great, it cannot justify the film’s enormous budget. It cost $151.7 million—nearly four times the cost of its parent films with half the wow factor; the visuals are just not as impressive as past installments in the series. It lacks the grandiosity of Glass Onion’s famous scene of the Mona Lisa burning behind the collapsing facade of a mansion, or the fantastic pacing and cinematography of Knives Out. Wake Up Dead Man felt comparatively slower and just far less elegant or awe-inspiring. 

The ensemble of suspects, too, just pales in comparison to the memorable performances audiences saw in prior films with Chris Evans or Jamie Lee Curtis. This lineup is forgettable at best: they have personalities, but the acting is flat and uninspired. This comes with the notable exception of Martha Delacroix (Glenn Close), an elderly woman fanatically dedicated to Wicks’s grandfather, the church, and faith. Close delivers a classic caricature you’d expect from a murder mystery flick: a nosy, ridiculously religious woman. However, she was also an emotive and dynamic character who might draw a tear from audiences at the end of the film. No surprise there, as she is a veteran actress with 50 years in acting. 

Is Wake Up Dead Man better than its predecessors? Reviews say otherwise, but it arguably is if you are looking for a film with more depth of emotion that still makes you crack a smile. It is a testament to the strength of competent acting coupled with a good script, and it is an addition to the Knives Out series that has allowed it to achieve the exotic, perfect trifecta not even seen in the Godfather film series. It seems God has willed it.