Wake Up Dead Man Abandons the Cozy Knives Out Formula — And That’s a Good Thing

Poe’s gothic atmosphere is only one reference point. The film centers on a troubled priest, which summons echoes of The Exorcist (to which Johnson offers a brief visual homage). Father Jud Duplenticy—portrayed by Josh O’Connor, who recently co-starred in Challengers—feels pulled from older melodramatic traditions as much as contemporary ones. Once a boxer, Jud turned to the priesthood and has been reassigned to a small upstate New York parish after an incident at his former church.

Jud is pressed into service attending to Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin), a bitter and combative cleric whose sermons thin his congregation to a few stubborn followers. Following an especially incendiary sermon, Wicks retreats into a visible alcove with a single exit—and then, impossibly, never comes out alive. Johnson frames the murder as a modern take on the locked-room puzzle.

Johnson delays Blanc’s appearance until nearly halfway through the story, a structural choice that pushes the film closer to the episodic feel of Johnson’s Poker Face. In the interim, he populates the parish with an eccentric ensemble designed to generate suspicion: a police officer (Mila Kunis), an attorney (Kerry Washington), a physician (Jeremy Renner), an influencer-turned-politician (Daryl McCormack), an ardent parishioner (Glenn Close), a groundskeeper (Thomas Haden Church), a musician (Cailee Spaeny), and a once-adored sci-fi writer now peddling grievance (Andrew Scott). As always, Johnson sculpts characters who are both amusing and potentially culpable.

Yet this installment carries a persistent gothic dread. The film’s remote setting, the church’s diminished congregation, and an imposing mausoleum on the grounds create a claustrophobic, haunted atmosphere. Regular collaborator cinematographer Steve Yedlin amplifies those themes with arresting night compositions and audacious splashes of color—particularly striking uses of red that recall blood-drenched giallo imagery.

Wake Up Dead Man is not an exercise in gratuitous gore nor a straight-faced demonic horror tale; rather, it evokes the uncanny by placing characters in a liminal, almost purgatorial state. Spaeny’s musician seeks relief from chronic pain; Scott’s author clings to the hope of a comeback; the parish itself hovers between vitality and collapse. Even the treatment of Wicks’ corpse—interred within a mausoleum instead of buried—becomes a recurring source of unease.

The dynamic between Jud and Blanc is nuanced: they are allied investigators who approach death from divergent perspectives rather than antagonistic opposites of faith and reason. That dual inquiry gives the film a cerebral dimension, but Johnson never abandons the pleasures of a puzzle-box mystery. The movie remains witty and clever, yet its emotional aftertaste is darker than its predecessors. Where previous entries resolved with a sense of restoration and forensic triumph, this one leaves a more ambiguous, harder-won consolation in the wake of death.

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery is currently playing in theaters (visit the film’s site to find participating venues), and is scheduled to arrive on Netflix on Dec. 12, 2025. Check participating locations here.

Source: Polygon