Review Roundup: Rian Johnson’s Wake Up Dead Man
When Rian Johnson’s Knives Out arrived in theaters in 2019, its twisting and turning murder mystery was widely praised, as was Daniel Craig’s performance as the detective Benoit Blanc. The followup, 2022’s Glass Onion, wasn’t quite as good as its predecessor, with a few too many twists and turns. But even so, a new Knives Out film is still reason to rejoice, which brings us to this year’s Wake Up Dead Man.
This time around, Blanc is tasked with solving yet another impossible murder involving a dead priest and deeply connected religious community. Will the devoutly unreligious Blanc, in an unlikely pairing with a troubled clergyman, make inroads into this mystery? Or will it prove too much even for his deductive skills. Read on for a selection of critical reactions to Johnson’s latest murder mystery.
Rian Johnson’s delectable new Knives Out film is a chocolate box: mouthwateringly delicious on the first layer and … well, perfectly tasty on the second. Daniel Craig returns as private detective Benoit Blanc, in a slightly more serious mode than before, with not as many droll suth’n phrases and quirky faux-naif mannerisms, but rocking a longer hairstyle and handsomely tailored three-piece suit.
Blanc keeps things off-kilter as he quickly proclaims himself a determined rationalist, totally uninterested in anything that the priest who was just praying for help might have to offer him, except for his assistance in solving a murder. But before that business is cleared up, Blanc will be drawn into a struggle that will show him a new and unsuspected side of faith.
It’s a lavishly staged and lengthy gothic, and it too is trying for something grander than the first Knives Out. But this one is more rooted and organic than Glass Onion, and it returns us to the trap-door-of-reality ingenuity of the first film. These are movies that use their elemental trickiness to put us in touch with our wide-eyed inner child. They’re immersive, in that what’s-gonna-happen-next? way, though part of the reason that Wake Up Dead Man is more enthralling than Glass Onion is that the film works so fully on a human scale.
Even when he isn’t hitting home runs, he produces something indubitably watchable and entertaining, and likely more than satisfying for a majority of the audience. Wake Up Dead Man, the third entry in his monumentally popular Benoit Blanc-Knives Out series, will tickle viewers in theaters and on Netflix during the holiday season. What Johnson withholds in innovation, he more than makes up for with political commentary.
There’s something so satisfying about the way these movies work, finding ways to play with and innovate on this beloved genre — ensuring that no matter how many pieces of the puzzle you think you know, there are at least one or two surprises still to come. It’s the sort of mystery only a true mystery fan could write: One so familiar with all the tricks that he knows how to outfox them.
It’s clear that everyone involved in these films is having an absolute blast, and it remains as infectious as ever, even as Johnson edges closer to darkness with this gothic whodunnit. Here’s to hoping that Benoit Blanc keeps going, and that Johnson eventually leans further into the more overtly horror-coded mysteries.
Each of writer-director Rian Johnson’s Knives Out whodunits, like the paperbacks they draw from and sometimes literally cite, is defined by the setting of its murder. Where the original squeezed class critique from its drawing room of squabbling one-percenters and Glass Onion over-indulged on a Mediterranean takedown of its billionaire tech bro’s inner circle, Wake Up Dead Man welcomes Johnson’s blend of snark and sincerity into a church that houses both crime and suspects. More quaintly focused than the exuberant previous film, though with no shortage of eccentric characters or longwinded side stories, Wake Up Dead Man agreeably seeks answers both existential and earthly.
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.
Inspired by “locked door mysteries” like The Hollow Man and The Murders in the Rue Morgue, Dead Man sees Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc investigating an impossible case that allows Johnson to explore themes of faith vs. logic, greed vs. sacrifice, and even the need for all kinds of storytelling in our lives, from those of faith to those of film. It’s one of several recent examples of talented writers trying to meet the moment of life in the 2020s not head-on but from the side, incorporating themes of the current “State of Things” into a fascinating mystery that also plays with timeless chords. It’s an ambitious delight, a movie that doesn’t divide the faithful from the heretic but reminds them of their common needs.
I get that this is Johnson’s bread and butter, and, until this, his filmography has been nothing but straight masterpieces. Yet, there’s very little in Wake Up Dead Man’s reveal that works in its favor or feels as fresh as the previous two Knives Out movies. Just like Benoit Blanc being tired of solving cases that are seemingly “impossible” to crack, Rian Johnson feels worn out from trying to twist the same formula in different directions to give audiences something genuinely different.
This isn’t a hit job but a nuanced look at organized religion through the lens of a genre that’s concerned with justice. For any such film to be any good, it would acknowledge the harms visited on the world by the church. Thankfully, Wake Up Dead Man is excellent. Johnson’s wit cuts both ways, both critiquing and upholding the work of the church in the world.
In characteristic Knives Out fashion, this one’s another moderately bawdy romp with a stacked ensemble cast, chock-full of twists and turns, and laced with winking contemporary references. And once again, it’s not just a murder mystery. It has a lot on its mind, mostly revolving around religion: what it is, what it isn’t and how it gets twisted and exploited to incite fear and hate. Somehow, that’s all done with a remarkably light, affectionately irreverent touch.
Wake Up Dead Man begins streaming on Netflix on December 12, 2025.
