Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (2025)

Who Gets to Exist in this Mystery, and Who Doesn’t?

Watching Wake Up, Dead Man feels like being invited into a familiar room that’s been rearranged just enough for you to enjoy yourself. The film is sleek, controlled, and deliberately paced, the kind of mystery that wants you to feel smart for keeping up. It’s confident in its construction, careful with its reveals, and clearly proud of its lineage. And if you are a fan of the Knives Out series, you will enjoy it.

The plot itself is perfectly teased: a death, a small circle of suspects, and the slow tightening of moral pressure as secrets surface. Even without diving into specifics, the setup signals a story about power, performance, and truth, themes that naturally invite questions of inclusion.

The bigger question is whether the movie’s polish leaves room for everyone, or whether some people are only allowed to exist as narrative furniture. I enjoyed watching it. I just wasn’t convinced it wanted everyone watching to feel equally welcome.

At its core, Wake Up, Dead Man is a story about people protecting their external versions of themselves and how they are viewed (or perceived to be viewed), set against the backdrop of an impossible crime in a rural church. The mystery begins when Monsignor Jefferson Wicks, the dominating spiritual leader of his congregation, played realistically well by Josh Brolin, is found dead during a service.

Into this tightly knit world comes the famous Benoit Blanc, Daniel Craig as our charismatic detective with a new hairdo. Fans clearly recognize Blanc from Knives Out (2019) and Glass Onion (2022). Here, our beloved protagonist is now tasked with unraveling a case that blurs faith, ritual, and suspicion.

Father Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor), a young priest with a complicated past, quickly becomes both Blanc’s reluctant ally and the community’s prime suspect.