Rian Johnson Takes His Murder-Mystery Series to Exhausting Ends in Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery

More than anything, Rian Johnson loves exploring the textures of whatever dorky genre milieu he can get his hands on. Whether it’s teen detective mysteries (Brick), con-man globetrotting adventures (The Brothers Bloom), or original and franchise sci-fi alike (Looper and Star Wars: The Last Jedi), Johnson is always eager to dive into familiar pulpy palettes and refashion them into his own distinct character. It’s what makes his Knives Out series feel so well-suited to his sensibilities: He can spin episodic capers for his southern-fried, urbane, paperback mystery-novel detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), each set in whatever context seems fun at the time — an autumnal jaunt to a New England mansion, a summer vacation in sunny Greece, and now a gothic turn as he investigates a murder in a small-town church.

The trajectory of the three Knives Out films mirrors the tonal shifts that once gave great mystery novelists a splash of exotic flavor to underline what is, ideally, a cunning unraveling of the central puzzle. That said, Johnson — endearing as his voice often is — has never been Agatha Christie. Wake Up Dead Man falls into the same traps that made Knives Out more successful as a comedy than a mystery, and Glass Onion an overindulgent sequel. This third entry eases up (slightly) on name-dropping the endless cultural flashpoints of our divisive political climate, leaning instead toward a more meaningful mystery for Blanc. But it also suffers from so much narrative baggage that it fails both as the darker, personal story it wants to be and as the lighter comic escapade these films usually promise.

Even so, I admire Johnson’s gusto, if not always where it leads him. He’s in no rush to introduce Blanc into this story — instead, we spend half an hour of the very long 144 minute runtime getting acquainted with Rev. Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor), a troubled priest with a violent past who is sent by his parish to the remote town of Chimney Rock, New York to assist the social agitator Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin) at the quaint church of Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude. Over the course of his residency, he studies how Wicks cultivates a loyal sect of followers who believe in the potential for salvation from his fiercely fundamentalist prodding. It’s when a sudden death among the citizens occurs that Blanc arrives on the scene to crack the case, and potentially clear Jud’s name.

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The story of a controversial firebrand who seeks to push the limits of decorum, establishing a cult of personality wherein he is free to espouse his contentious ideology and define the truth on his terms, is quite the timely one-for-one mirror of the past decade of American politics. “Anger lets us fight back,” and “The world wants to destroy us,” says Monsignor Wicks, who’s scared that the “feminists, marxists, and whores” are jeopardizing a traditional and fixed way of life. Johnson seems to aim for a broad examination of religious and political fanaticism — how we’re willing to pledge devotion to harmful institutions for reassurance and refuge. But by making his Trump analogue so obvious, he undermines the story’s larger thematic potential, as well as the direct tension between Blanc’s rational logic and a case that seemingly defies earthly explanation.

The blame may also lie in the fact that the extended ensemble, once again, mostly feels like they were conceived as broad archetypes of people that Johnson dreamed up while scrolling his social media feed. Andrew Scott’s radicalized sci-fi writer Lee Ross has “freed himself” from the “liberal hive mind” and aspires to rise above Substack drivel. Daryl McCormack’s Cy, a failed political hopeful, delivers a facetious monologue packed with every contentious buzzword you might hear on Facebook or cable news. Maybe that’s meant as a sly joke, condensing obligatory cultural callouts into one burst, but the script’s ungainly haranguing makes it fall flat. True to form, Knives Out always feels like playing a game of Clue with one eye fixed on Twitter.

Elsewhere, much of the cast has surprisingly little to do for most of the movie. Craig is once again great as Blanc, utilizing that goofy southern charm to turn in a slightly more grizzled rendition of the character who finds himself more distressed than usual about the crime at hand (but still perfectly capable of letting out a hilarious stray utterance, and I will continue to think about the way he delivers “Scooby Dooby Doo” here for a long time). O’Connor, meanwhile, isn’t just Blanc’s partner on the case — he’s practically the main character and may have more screen time than Craig. The two make for a convincing dynamic as they scuttle around town, turning over every loose rock possible. But almost everyone else gets left aside as mere set dressing — everyone from Jeremy Renner and Kerry Washington to Cailee Spaeny and Thomas Haden Church feels like they’re only useful to the movie when the plot absolutely needs them to make something happen. Otherwise, Wake Up Dead Man is a mystery that’s surprisingly bad at getting everyone involved with the central stakes. Even Glenn Close, as the zealous church overseer, can’t overcome the film’s protracted and strained pacing. For a mystery, Wake Up Dead Man is surprisingly bad at making its ensemble feel essential to the stakes.

Johnson has spoken about how this is Blanc’s Edgar Allen Poe-style mystery, taking the genre back to its roots as a counterpoint to Glass Onion’s attempt at an almost postmodern deconstruction. There’s baked-in appeal there: Production designer Rick Heinrichs makes good on his opportunity to turn this small community into, in the film’s best moments, an eerie and haunted tangle of evocative traumatic history and hidden motives. And Johnson has fun paying homage to his predecessors. He even weaves in John Dickson Carr’s The Hollow Man into a key plot point as a direct nod to the “locked-room” style case Blanc faces. As a traditional mystery, the film offers more pulp than its predecessor, because the script isn’t constantly undercutting its own conceit.

But Wake Up Dead Man’s final revelations aren’t fulfilling or meaningful enough to make up for the relative lack of fun it is to slog through its repetitious plotting. By the time the answers are being breathlessly revealed over the final 20 minutes, it’s hard not to feel at a remove from the fervent epiphanies meant to unlock the heart of the bedlam in the souls of these characters. You can feel Johnson’s exhaustive knowledge of genre bursting at the seams, but I don’t know that that’s an excuse for making a movie that feels so fatiguing.

Director: Rian Johnson
Writer: Rian Johnson
Stars: Daniel Craig, Josh O’Connor, Glenn Close, Josh Brolin, Mila Kunis, Jeremy Renner, Kerry Washington, Andrew Scott, Cailee Spaeny, Daryl McCormack, Thomas Haden Church
Release date: Sept. 6, 2025 (TIFF), Dec. 12, 2025 (Netflix)

Trace Sauveur is a writer based in Austin, TX, where he primarily contributes to The Austin Chronicle. He loves David Lynch, John Carpenter, the Fast & Furious movies, and all the same bands he listened to in high school. He is @tracesauveur on Twitter where you can allow his thoughts to contaminate your feed.