TIFF Review: “Wake Up Dead Man”

Wake Up Dead Man (Rian Johnson, 2025) 3½ out of 5 stars

With the 2019 film Knives Out, writer/director Rian Johnson (Star Wars: The Last Jedi) added the whodunit to his repertoire, continuing with the 2022 sequel, Glass Onion, and now the 2025 follow-up, Wake Up Dead Man. All three movies tell entirely standalone stories, with their only connecting tissue the presence of preening private detective Benoit Blanc (played each time by James Bond himself, Daniel Craig). The latest installment proves that trilogies need not fall apart over time, engaging the audience with not only a solid mystery but also some meaningful conversations about faith. If overlong, it’s still a thoroughly entertaining mystery adorned with plenty of atmosphere and hijinks.

Josh O’Connor (La Chimera) stars as Rev. Jud Duplenticy, a former boxer turned Catholic priest who is sent (more like banished) to a small town—Chimney Rock, in Upstate New York—after he punches a deacon over some disagreement. Though his superior, played by Jeffrey Wright (The Batman), agrees that said deacon had it coming, there still has to be the appearance of punishment. So off Father Jud goes to be the assistant to Msgr. Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin, Weapons), a fire-and-brimstone kind of preacher whose idea of Christianity runs counter to Duplenticy’s belief in kindness and forgiveness (that punch notwithstanding).

There, he finds a shrinking flock made up of increasingly angry and bitter parishioners, incarnated by a stellar cast: Thomas Haden Church (Spider-Man: No Way Home), Glenn Close (The Wife), Daryl McCormack (Good Luck To You, Leo Grande), Jeremy Renner (Tag), Andrew Scott (Netflix’s Ripley series), Cailee Spaeny (Alien: Romulus), and Kerry Washington (The Prom). The more Wicks rants, in bible-thumping fashion, on all kinds of ostensible modern-day evils, the more others leave the congregation, the core group thereby becoming more and more essential. They do not take kindly to Father Jud’s attempts to lighten the tone.

Slowly, the inevitable conflict between the two men of the cloth intensifies, until one day, no surprise (this is a Knives Out movie, after all), one of them is murdered. It can’t be Jud, since he’s been narrating from the start (this is no Sunset Boulevard), so there’s only one other candidate. Naturally, suspicions immediately fall on our fair young hero. Local Chief of Police, Geraldine (Mila Kunis, The Spy Who Dumped Me), has her hands more than full deciphering the truth from rumor.

Enter Blanc, as theatrical and arrogant as always. He is not religious in any way, however, so Johnson layers over the usual step-by-step breakdown of motive a series of conversations between him and Duplenticy about the nature of belief and humanity’s need for narrative to make sense of the world. These raise the metaphysical stakes of the piece but also slow it down.

In the end, this Knives Out mystery delivers the mixture of thrills and comedy we have come to expect, even if there are patches where the pace flags. O’Connor shows once again that he is among the best of his generation, and Craig reveals new levels of haminess that mostly suit the role. It may not quite wake the dead, but the film certainly stirs the living.

Christopher Llewellyn Reed

Christopher Llewellyn Reed is a film critic, filmmaker, and educator, as well as Film Festival Today's Editor. A member of both the Online Film Critics Society (OFCS) and the Washington DC Area Film Critics Association (WAFCA), and a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic, Chris is, in addition, lead film critic at Hammer to Nail and the author of Film Editing: Theory and Practice.