‘Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery’ review: A whodunnit with a surprising message about priesthood
Father Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor) is a fighter. A former boxer, he didn’t lose his strong left hook when he entered the seminary; when we meet him, he is in trouble for impulsively punching a rude deacon. But at his disciplinary tribunal, a superior tells him that fighters are what the church needs to combat the world: “A priest is a shepherd, the world is a wolf.”
You might think Jud would be happy for the out, but he doesn’t take it. He asserts that the real work of a priest is not to fight the world, but to embrace it, “to show broken people like me the forgiveness and love of Christ.”
“This,” he says, spreading his arms wide in welcome. Then he raises his fists before his chest. “Not this.”
“Wake Up Dead Man” is the third installment in writer-director Rian Johnson’s “Knives Out” mystery series, starring Daniel Craig as the meticulous, brilliant private detective Benoit Blanc. When Blanc, a champion of logic who calls himself “a proud heretic” arrives on the scene, the stage is set for an epic conflict between faith and reason. But “Wake Up Dead Man” reveals itself to be more meditative and original than that. At its heart, it is about competing visions of religious leadership, embodied by those two gestures offered by Father Jud. Is a priest meant to be a crusader warring against the forces of secularism, or a field nurse caring for the lost, forsaken and rejected?
The film is full of twists, but maybe the biggest surprise for me is that it becomes a beautiful and powerful reflection on what it means for the priest to act in persona Christi, “in the person of Christ.”
Father Jud is given a last-chance assignment at the struggling parish of Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude in upstate New York. The current pastor is Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin), whom Jud’s mentor, Bishop Langstrom (Geoffrey Wright), describes as “a few beads short of a full rosary.” Wicks (who, of course, insists on being addressed as “Monsignor”) is an intimidating, dour man and an incendiary preacher.
Wicks has cultivated a small, devoted following of wealthy parishioners: alcoholic doctor Nat (Jeremy Renner); rigid lawyer Vera (Kerry Washington); her brother Cy (Daryl McCormack), a right wing YouTube personality; washed-up novelist Lee (Andrew Scott); and Simone (Cailee Spaeny), a famous disabled cellist. They believe that Wicks, or God acting through Wicks, can give them what they want. And no one is more loyal than Martha (Glenn Close), Wicks’s chief disciple who oversees parish affairs.
But when Wicks is murdered at the Good Friday service, they all become suspects. The crime is seemingly impossible, even supernatural. The local cops call in Benoit Blanc, who is happy to take up the challenge. “This was dressed as a miracle, but it was just a murder,” he says. “And I solve murders.”
The first two “Knives Out” films (2019’s “Knives Out” and 2022’s “Glass Onion”) embrace the tropes of a classic whodunnit: the intricately constructed mystery, the clues, the twists and the detective’s climactic revelation of how it all fits together. But instead of the Victorian London of Holmes or the interwar Europe of Poirot, Johnson’s films satirize modern American culture, with our polarized politics and bizarre online culture.
But “Wake Up Dead Man” is smaller and more personal in scale. Its small town setting gives Johnson, always a master stylist, a dynamic new visual palette: rich green forests, a mossy cemetery, a bar called Il Diavolo full of bright red Satanic kitsch. He also gets a lot of mileage out of the cinematic nature of Catholicism, capturing the ritual of Mass, and the Triduum in particular, in all of its byzantine grandeur. The church is a silent character in the story, and Johnson makes powerful use of light and shadow within its stone walls, even capturing the way that the atmosphere of a church can change when a cloud passes over the sun, or when light swells through the stained glass.
I love Johnson’s films, but I will confess to being a little nervous when I heard that the next “Knives Out” would take place at a Catholic parish. I am pleased to report, however, that “Wake Up Dead Man” allayed all of my fears. Its meditation on faith is both irreverent and generous, treating the topic and its significance in peoples’ lives with the weight that it deserves. I appreciated that it gets the details of Catholicism right: During a montage of Lent, for instance, the rose vestments of Laetare Sunday appear exactly when they should.
But what makes it really special, and one of my favorite movies of the year, is how it captures tensions within the church and explores the influences of religious leaders on the faithful. This is a film about fathers in the literal, spiritual and divine sense. The conflict between Jud and Wicks is not merely one of personalities, but of theology: each evinces a different image of God.
Wicks’s strategy of evangelization, if you can call it that, is one of division. During homilies, he singles out a new parishioner who is not living in perfect conformity with Catholic teaching (a single mother or a gay couple, for instance) and shames them until they leave in outrage. The goal is not just to drive away those whom Wicks finds undesirable but also to solidify his loyal parishioners’ sense of belonging and superiority. They are the good Catholics, they are worthy of staying. “By staying in that pew,” Jud says, “a side is taken.”
Unfortunately, this rings true. I have seen many Catholics display that narrow, combative approach to the faith, in person and online—including some shepherds of the church. It conjured for me people who claim to want a “smaller, purer” church, which too often translates to “me and people I like on the inside, and everyone else out in the cold.” But the real harm that Wicks causes is in conforming Christ to his image, not the other way around. As always happens with cults of personality, eventually his all-too-human imperfections are revealed. When they are, it leaves his followers feeling betrayed not only by their priest, but by God.
But if Wicks embodies all of our worst fears about the priesthood, Jud—played with stunning sensitivity and strength by O’Connor—embodies all that we hope a priest can be. He is humble, patient, but also relatably human. He never hides his fallibility and, indeed, sees it as an essential part of his ministry. Father Jud may be the first fictional priest to represent the field hospital church of Pope Francis. In one extraordinary scene, he brings the investigation to a halt—much to Blanc’s irritation—in order to have a pastoral conversation with a stranger. It is a beautiful depiction of what true priesthood looks like.
By the end of “Wake Up Dead Man,” the mystery has been solved. But for audiences of faith, it leaves us with an important question: What sort of church do we want, led by what kind of shepherds? Will we face the world with raised fists, ready for a fight? Or will we greet it with open arms?
“Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery” is playing in theaters and will be available on Netflix on December 12.
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