Movie Review: A call to action for a Church distracted
- deansimpson7
- Dec 31, 2025
- 3 min read
Wake Up Dead Man is the latest instalment of the popular ‘A Knives Out Mystery’ series. Detective Benoit Blanc teams up with an earnest young priest to investigate a ‘perfectly impossible crime’ at a small-town church with a dark history. Salvos Online journalist ANTHONY CASTLE reviews the film from a faith-based perspective.
A young priest walks into an old church for the first time. The pews are empty, and a mark on the far wall shows where something had once been hung. He steps closer to realise what is missing from the sanctuary. The cross is gone.
The symbolism that opens Rian Johnson’s latest murder mystery film may not be subtle, but its clarity serves a larger purpose.
Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery is the latest whodunnit from the writer/director and another case for the mercurial detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), but it also asks a question facing faith and culture right now: what is the real value at the heart of the Church?
Father Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor) is a former boxer who turned to the priesthood. After punching a deacon in frustration, Father Jud is assigned to the small-town Catholic Parish of Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude. There he finds the congregation dwindling under the fire-and-brimstone preaching of Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin).
Monsignor Wicks relies on shock and shame; his sermons are uploaded to YouTube, where they gather a larger following, while those in the pews increasingly walk out. “Are you here to take away my church?” Wicks asks. “I am here to serve,” Father Jud replies.
The two priests begin to work together, but Wicks is inexplicably stabbed to death in an alcove of the sanctuary during the Good Friday service. With no clear explanation as to how he was killed, Blanc arrives on the scene and calls it a “perfectly impossible crime”. Others call it a miracle.
The detective begins quizzing the parishioners about the case in a whirlwind tour of the ensemble cast that has all the wit and twists for which this franchise is known. The plot has all the secrecy and surprises expected of the genre, with a dose of miracle added to the mix. Johnson’s film is built around a series of polarities: reason and faith, grace and shame, an empty tomb and a missing cross (with many Biblical Easter Eggs along the way).
Writer/director Rian Johnson has reflected on his own experiences while promoting the film. A former ‘youth group kid’, the filmmaker found his faith changing in adulthood. While no longer identifying as Christian, Johnson’s film wrestles with the questions that defined his faith and his doubt, and offers a surprisingly devout answer.
These are times of polarisation and distraction. Social media is a space where shame and misinformation are weaponised. Those in the Church can fall prey to this, like anyone. Wake Up Dead Man isn’t just a fun murder mystery but also a call to action for any parts of the Church that may have found itself distracted.
While the film’s miracles are debunked and the killer caught, the rationalist detective does come to see the worth in personal sacrifice, following a confession by Father Jud:
… my real and only purpose in life, which is not to fight the wicked and bring them to justice, but to serve them and bring them to Christ ... We are here to serve the world, not beat it. That’s what Christ did.
Rian Johnson’s film asks questions of the faith he once held and finds answers for those who are still faithful. There is a true value to be found at the heart of the Church, not in shame and judgement, but within Jesus, in the picture of the cross and the service it represents.
Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery is now streaming on Netflix
