There is a moment early in Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery when Father Jud Duplenticy, a young priest, is asked a simple question: do you believe in the Devil? He pauses. The camera holds. And in that silence, Rian Johnson announces his intentions more clearly than any trailer could. This is not Glass Onion. This is not a sun-drenched romp on a billionaire’s island. This is a film about what we believe, why we believe it, and what happens when belief becomes indistinguishable from grievance.
It arrives on Netflix having premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2025, following a limited theatrical run from 26 November. The reception has been rapturous – and divided. Owen Gleiberman, writing in Variety, called it “the sharpest Knives Out movie yet.” Damon Wise at Deadline suggested it “might endure as the best one yet.” Others, notably at The Film Stage and Screen Rant, have been cooler. The truth, as with all good murder mysteries, lies somewhere in the folds. For a fuller picture of the year’s cinematic output, our Pile of Films roundup provides context.
The Gothic Pivot
Johnson has spoken openly about the tonal shift. Where Knives Out (2019) was a cozy New England mystery and Glass Onion (2022) was a glossy, satirical romp set on a Greek island, Wake Up Dead Man plunges into gothic territory. The setting is Chimney Rock, a fictional hamlet in upstate New York, centred on the crumbling Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude parish. The colour palette is stone greys, candlelit amber, and deep shadows that make a church feel like a mausoleum.
Cinematographer Steve Yedlin, Johnson’s longtime collaborator, delivers some of his finest work. The production design by Rick Heinrichs – whose credits include Sleepy Hollow – is extraordinarily detailed. The church’s interior was built from scratch in a London studio after scouts determined that no real English church matched the neo-Gothic American aesthetic Johnson required. “It was devilishly hard to find a church in England that didn’t look at least several centuries too old for a U.S. church,” Heinrichs told journalists. The exterior was the Holy Innocents Church at High Beach in Epping Forest, whose Victorian architecture and surrounding graveyard provided the “storybook-like charm” Johnson wanted.
Filming took place across the UK in summer 2024, with additional work in Cold Spring, New York. The film’s budget, according to UK company filings reported by The Guardian, totalled approximately £151.7 million – reduced from an original projection of £192.7 million thanks to British tax incentives.
The Impossible Crime
The plot draws from a rich tradition. Johnson has cited Edgar Allan Poe, John Dickson Carr, and G.K. Chesterton as primary influences, and the film wears those debts openly. The central mystery is a locked-room puzzle: Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin, in a performance of ferocious intensity) collapses during a Good Friday service with a knife fashioned from a red devil’s-head lamp finial lodged in his back. The door was shut. No one entered or left. The entire congregation was present in the nave.
It is, in the parlance of detective fiction, an “impossible crime” – a subgenre that Ronald Knox, the priest and crime writer, attempted to codify in 1929 with his “Ten Commandments” of detective fiction. Knox’s rules, which included prohibitions against supernatural agencies and secret passages, were designed to level the playing field between author and reader. Johnson knows these rules intimately. He references Knox’s commandments in the film itself, showing Blanc’s reading list. And then, with the quiet confidence of a filmmaker who has earned the right to break his own rules, he shatters them.
But this is not mere cleverness. The breaking of Knox’s rules – the intrusion of the inexplicable, the suggestion that not everything can be rationally explained – serves the film’s deeper argument. As Brian Tallerico wrote in his review for RogerEbert.com: “It’s an ambitious delight, a movie that doesn’t divide the faithful from the heretic but reminds them of their common needs.”
Faith, Reason, and the Algorithm
Here is where Wake Up Dead Man transcends the whodunit. Johnson pairs Blanc – the ultimate rationalist, a man who trusts only what can be observed and deduced – with Jud, a priest whose entire existence is predicated on faith in the unseen. Their dynamic is not adversarial but complementary. They learn from each other. And in doing so, Johnson makes a quiet, radical argument: that the binary opposition of faith and reason, science and religion, logic and belief, is itself a kind of false dichotomy.
This might sound abstract for a murder mystery. It is not. Johnson grounds it in the specifics of the present moment. The congregation surrounding Wicks is not merely devout – it is radicalised. Andrew Scott plays Lee Ross, a former best-selling author turned conspiracy theorist who has literally built a moat around his house. Daryl McCormack’s Cy Draven is an aspiring politician who weaponises social media outrage, treating his YouTube channel as a pulpit. Glenn Close’s Martha Delacroix is a true believer of terrifying conviction, loyal to Wicks since childhood.
These are not caricatures – or rather, they are caricatures that have become real. The echo chambers they inhabit, the disinformation they consume, the grievance that binds them: Johnson is drawing a direct line between the theology of a small-town church and the broader epistemological crisis of the 2020s. Cy’s YouTube sermons include references to “GOD in DOGE” – a detail so absurd it could only be contemporary.
The film’s most penetrating insight is that the detective story and the religious story share a common structure. Both seek meaning in chaos. Both promise that the world is ultimately legible, that patterns exist beneath the noise. Blanc, standing in a church, declares himself a heretic – and yet his entire vocation is an act of faith: faith that truth can be found, that order can be imposed on disorder, that the puzzle can be solved. By setting his murder mystery inside a church, Johnson makes the subtext text.
Josh O’Connor’s Breakthrough
Much has been written about Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc, and rightly so. Owen Gleiberman called this Craig’s “richest” performance in the role. But the film’s secret weapon is Josh O’Connor.
O’Connor plays Father Jud with a bruised, anxious vitality. Jud is a former boxer who killed a man in the ring and has been trying to atone ever since. He was sent to Chimney Rock after punching a deacon – a detail the film treats not as comic relief but as evidence of a man at war with his own capacity for violence.
For much of the first act, Blanc is absent entirely. Johnson trusts O’Connor to carry the film, and he does so brilliantly. “The outstanding Josh O’Connor,” wrote Chase Hutchinson in TheWrap, “not only gives the franchise’s best comedic performance but brings a genuine amount of grace to a film that ends up becoming precisely about that.” Joey Magidson at Awards Radar went further, calling O’Connor’s work “the best performance overall in the trilogy.”
The film’s runtime – 144 minutes – could have been indulgent. Instead, it moves with the momentum of a well-constructed puzzle, each scene revealing a new piece. Bob Ducsay’s editing maintains a rhythm that allows the theological questions to breathe without sacrificing the pleasures of the genre.
The Netflix Question
There is an irony at the heart of Wake Up Dead Man that Johnson seems to relish. The film arrived on Netflix on 12 December 2025, having received a two-week theatrical run that was, by all accounts, modest. Its opening weekend drew 20.2 million views and 49.2 million hours watched – respectable figures that placed it at number one on Netflix’s global chart. But this represented a roughly 40 per cent decline from Glass Onion‘s debut weekend, which accumulated 82.1 million hours viewed in its first seven days.
The theatrical picture was starker. Wake Up Dead Man grossed approximately $3 million at the domestic box office – far below Glass Onion‘s $15 million limited release and incomparable to the original Knives Out‘s $312.9 million worldwide haul. Johnson himself expressed frustration at the limited distribution, telling fans he hoped Netflix would “push it out a bit” so that families could experience it on the big screen.
The numbers matter because they illuminate a tension the film itself interrogates. Wake Up Dead Man is, at its core, about the democratisation of truth – about who gets to define reality. That it arrives via a streaming platform algorithmically optimised for engagement rather than a theatrical model designed for communal experience is not lost on Johnson. The film takes sly potshots at Netflix itself, and at Johnson’s own Star Wars tenure, in moments that feel less like winking self-reference than genuine provocation.
A Trilogy of Questions
What Johnson has built across three films is not merely a franchise but a sustained inquiry into how stories function. Knives Out asked who gets to control a narrative. Glass Onion asked what happens when the people telling the story are lying. Wake Up Dead Man asks the most unsettling question of all: what if the story we need most – the one that assures us the world makes sense – is the one we can no longer bring ourselves to believe? As our Film coverage has tracked, the whodunit revival has been a defining thread of contemporary cinema.
The film does not answer this question. Instead, it offers something rarer: a space in which the question can be held, examined, and – perhaps – tolerated. In a year of cynical sequels and algorithmically generated content, Wake Up Dead Man feels like something close to a miracle. Not because it is perfect – it is not – but because it is serious. It trusts its audience to sit with ambiguity, to find pleasure in uncertainty, to believe that a story about murder can also be a story about mercy.
Johnson may return to this world again. He has said that three films do not necessarily constitute a trilogy, and Craig has expressed his enthusiasm for continuing. But if Wake Up Dead Man is the last we see of Benoit Blanc, it is a fitting conclusion: the detective, for once, does not impose order on chaos. He simply observes that the chaos was the point all along.
The truth, as Blanc might say, is rarely the thing we expect. It is the thing we were afraid to look for.
