Direction: Rian Johnson
Country: UK
Wake Up Dead Man, the third installment of the Knives Out franchise, is a sporadically watchable whodunit assembled without much brilliance. Here you’ll find a tenacious religious cult of personality, heavy confessions, an insoluble murder mystery, ghostly apparitions, and mystical insinuations. Yet the film is not nearly as clever as it believes itself to be. Written, directed, and co-produced by Rian Johnson (Looper, 2012; Star Wars: The Last Jedi, 2017), who also signed the previous two entries (2019 and 2022), it feels increasingly mannered and self-satisfied.
Artificial and predictable, the film is a collage of cheap schemes and contrived plotting revolving around guilt-ridden Father Jud (Josh O’Connor), a former boxer turned Catholic priest assigned to a rural parish in upstate New York. There, Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin)—a provocateur and opportunist who thrives on a cult of personality—presides over a congregation of fanatical, ambitious followers, whose simmering tensions gradually come to the surface. When a gruesome crime occurs inside the church, only the famed private detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), operating with his trademark relaxed yet sharply observant demeanor, appears capable of untangling the mystery.
Despite a stellar cast and an abundance of secrets waiting to be unearthed, the story never truly coheres, creeping forward in a disorienting manner that suggests narrative confusion rather than deliberate complexity. The mystery itself proves more bland than intriguing, and by the time the case reaches its conclusion, it feels more undaunting than haunting. Wake Up Dead Man ultimately takes the shape of a hollow parody—a loud, overcooked puzzle that favors spectacle over substance. Sadly, beyond its wackiness, few of its moments are sharp or amusing enough to earn even a fleeting smile.
