Mill Valley Film Festival 2025: 'Wake Up Dead Man' is a Re-whetting of the 'Knives Out' Saga

“You’re good at this.”

Says Glenn Close’s shady and deeply devout Martha Delacroix as she takes Josh O’Connor’s steadfast and haunted Rev. Jud Duplenticy’s hand and in hers. At this tense moment, it’s as if Close is speaking for the audience of Wake Up Dead Man. Rian Johnson’s third Knives Out mystery featuring Daniel Craig’s Southern gentleman detective Benoit Blanc is just as much a rollicking return to form for this delightful series as it is a prime showcase for one of our generation’s brightest young stars.

Following franchise tradition, this third Blanc adventure isn’t really about Blanc, he just comes in to “observe the facts without biases of the head or heart.” Likewise, as Ana De Armas and Janelle Monaé led their respective installments, Josh O’Connor bears the real weight of this story. Since breaking into the mainstream with The Crown and Challengers, O’Connor has proved himself to be more than capable of carrying a larger scaled film, and this is arguably his largest canvas yet – though it’s still but a quaintly sized puzzle.

His allure soars off the charts in his jittery and sincere portrayal of the ingeniously named Jud Duplenticy, a young priest whose path toward the cloth was set by his former career as a boxer, where he committed a cardinal sin and looked to Christ for forgiveness and a new path. Still battling those demons following a local mishap, Duplenticy’s new assignment to a small church in upstate New York distracts him for a while, but as he clashes more and more with Josh Brolin’s dictatorial Monsignor Wicks, decades of buried secrets unfurl until his ecclesiastical domain reaches a boiling point. O’Connor winningly embodies Duplenticy’s conviction and kindness while never shaving off his rougher edges. It’s a starmaking turn for a pre-certified star, but those incoming holiday Netflix streams en masse won’t hurt. 

“Wake up dead man” also feels like a command to Johnson from himself – a directive on how to kick back into high gear after the static Glass Onion. After Johnson sold the rights to two sequels for his 2019 Oscar-nominated sleeper hit to the streaming titan, the franchise took a bit of a dive with its standalone sequel. Glass Onion was primed to meet its moment, but felt immediately dated in the midst of COVID culture speedrunning micro-eras of online relevance. Its 2022 holiday release rendered pandemic setups and knockdowns stale, and its skewering of tech moguls worn out, though prescient. Johnson’s craft, while sharp, felt overfamiliar as he delivered an on-base hit without thrill.

That entertaining romp carried little of the sweetness or coziness of its predecessor, something this follow-up rectifies knowingly in its warm opening frames. Johnson applies his cheeky sensibilities more sparingly and fittingly with a zippy confidence in a far quieter environment. Wake Up Dead Man’s twists and turns genuinely thrill while its jokes and jabs elicit laughs which echo through the theater, the space where this film undoubtedly belongs.

After Glass Onion’s brighter summery tones and glossy setting, Johnson reverts his threequel to the bundled-up autumnal roots of Knives Out, a milieu that conceals the series’ most labyrinthian mystery; it's one that lies coiled inside the walls of this ornate church and around the allegedly hardened values of acolytes. Their closets hold so many skeletons that one’s cavernous tomb ends up playing a crucial role in the whodunnit. Slinking around dusty brick buildings and aged streets, the opening passage of the film luxuriates in the more befitting setting while Johnson plays with religious compositions and takes apropos potshots at the church’s supposedly hallowed halls despite its youth in the grand scheme of time. The central murder is properly knotty and slyly built toward, yet the subsequent fallout pulls the rug out from under the audience more times than one can count, each time more delightfully than the last.

As the franchise’s stalwart lead, Craig brings a lived-in confidence to Blanc that matches Johnson’s craft, evoking how collaborative these films seem to be. Craig was the latest and longest-serving 007 and has immediately shaken the burden of that character’s legacy by carving his own indelible character with Johnson. This third outing is inarguably his most honed. The novelty of seeing Craig relish Blanc’s gentlemanly boorishness caked in a thick Southern accent is gone, but he now brings comfort as a familiar face and personality to ease us into the tale. Wake Up Dead Man offers the deepest insight into Blanc’s character yet, and Craig plays heavier moments with a tender distance, but he’s no mythic hero; the less we know about the detective, the better, and this duo remains committed to telling the audience as little as we need to know about him. "Accept the mystery", as a great man once said. 

Craig and O’Connor’s surrounding ensemble is, like franchise predecessors’, quite delectable. Close is magnetic as Delacroix, who could become hammy and undignified in the hands of a lesser actor, but Close brings her signature fire and cunning to this woman whose ties to the web of lies ensnare generations. Brolin is magnetic as the overlord of his domain, ruling the sacred space with an iron fist that’s far too active for Duplenticy’s liking, but just dastardly enough for any audience game enough to buy into his wig. The majority of this ensemble is given shorter shrift than the prior two, but most of the cast steps up to bat. Particularly, Kerry Washington and Thomas Haden Church chew scenery with their minimal screentime.

While the scandals that tie the unlikely group together are intriguing and bear a refreshing eerie edge, the heart of this story pushes it beyond being a simple trifle. O’Connor commits himself to Duplenticy and all his turmoil; his heart’s in the right place, but he can’t stand on his own against Monsignor or his disciples. Johnson threads the arc of Duplenticy’s self-determination right in with Blanc’s investigation, necessitating real growth over the course of the film. Through timeless setups and knockdowns, this drama pays out like a slot machine. Johnson’s tangibly delirious joy in his filmmaking serves his script well here and serves O’Connor even better, as he delivers a remarkably endearing character and reinvigorates this original series, a rarity in an ever-growing Hollywood landscape of decades-old IP.

Comfort is an odd feeling to associate with the murder mystery, but there’s no point in arguing with the obvious. From Christie to Carr, their premier genre invokes dimly lit alleyways, roaring fires, and dark windy nights. Reductive as this may be, it’s a great baseline from which to build an entry into the genre, and a foundation that can easily subvert audience conjectures. Wake Up Dead Man embraces convention in its aesthetics and structure, but Johnson’s sleight of hand in his writing comes through his straightforward sincerity. Something about him won’t let the irony poisoning the world, – which he still takes aim at, and occasionally hits – infect his writing. Wake Up Dead Man’s greatest accomplishment is its sweetness, all the more so because it is mired in an uglier jumbo than before. Crafting a pageturner in a non-literary medium is no easy feat, yet Johnson makes it look easy. 

Wake Up Dead Man opens in select theaters on Nov. 26 and on Netflix on Dec. 12.

-August