Rian Johnson brought the whodunnit into the 21st century, for better or worse. Knives Out revived it, imbuing the subgenre with the cozy vibes we yearned for at the end of the first Trump term; Glass Onion undermined it with its self-satisfied cleverness, yet ultimately landed with its righteous indignation at the outrageous wealth accumulated by the 1% during COVID. But Wake Up Dead Man is a crisis of faith: in the mystery genre, in Netflix, certainly in an America on the brink. Not in God, though — God definitely doesn’t exist.
Wake Up Dead Man finds Johnson affixing the Play-Doh mold of his Knives Out franchise formula — gentleman sleuth Benoit Blanc inserts himself amidst a parade of A-list actors, at least one of whom has committed an elaborate and flamboyant murder — to the world of Catholicism. Strangely, though, the whodunnit plot in Wake Up Dead Man is practically ancillary to the movie around it. Instead, the film is interested in everything but the whodunnit: it’s an exercise in Very Online handwringing, a facile reckoning with faith, and a weak attack on the limits of filmmaking in the streaming era.
In a fully-digitized world, it’s difficult to observe how it changes around us, but standing Wake Up Dead Man and the previous Knives Out entries side by side, you can tell how different 2025 looks from 2019 or even 2022, and how it’s a march of time Johnson is unprepared to adequately address. Admirable, on its face, for a filmmaker to look directly at the moment, certainly: it’s hard to do without looking foolish, so most don’t bother trying. But Johnson’s Twitter-brained hot takes — perfect for the late Trump 1.0 and Biden periods — disintegrate under today’s inferno-bright blaze, and he lacks the courage to put the phone down and actually observe how digital communication has infected discourse within spiritual communities and without.
Johnson winds the mystery up for a full 40 minutes, refracting the goings on of a small-town parish through Father Jud, a boxer turned priest — admirably tackled by Josh O’Connor, who’s good but is also directed to cry too often — he’s way better in The Mastermind — who’s been whisked there to keep tabs on the tyrannical Monsignor Wicks. The entire opening stretch plays like it was written by a student of detective fiction — as in, a high school student, the nerdy precocious kid who can’t help but contextualize his reverence for the genre with jokes about masturbation and how crazy the world is right now — filtering witty, hardboiled dialogue through the prism of spirituality, which it dreadfully condescends to. When Blanc finally arrives, he rails against Christianity with the holier-than-thou zeal of a c. 2012 Redditor who just watched The Four Horsemen HD: Hour 1 of 2 on Richard Dawkins’ YouTube channel.
A non-religious filmmaker can certainly make a movie about Christianity, but Wake Up Dead Man doesn’t demonstrate any curiosity about Christianity, and, by extension, a world that exists beyond the boundary of a Bluesky feed. Like Conclave, it’s post-religion: it stoops Christianity — an institution worthy of criticism, no doubt — to the low, easy target of electoral politics. Monsignor Wicks spits the same fire and brimstone American Carnage rhetoric Trump does, and his followers apologize for his uncouth behavior off the pulpit because they’re fighting “an existential war.” It’s not an in-between-the-lines relationship between fact and fiction, either: one of the murder suspects tells Wicks he could be president. But Wicks is a terrible analogy for Trump — he’s too cunning, too clever, and while it may be impossible for the writer of a whodunnit to conceive of an antagonist as stupid as Trump, the last 12 years have proved people really would follow such a silly and reckless leader as he.
All this would be forgivable if the movie was made with some verve. Lots of morally bankrupt movies are terrific thrill rides (F1 being a great recent example), and Johnson is a filmmaker known for his technical proficiency — his Star Wars movie is a total failure narratively, but it at least looks like a Star Wars movie. Wake Up Dead Man, however, is indistinguishable from the Netflix slop it will share tiles with on your screen: textureless, washed-out lighting; a cavalcade of unmotivated long-zooms and canted angles through stained glass that isn’t there; a horribly wasted Vertigo shot — there’s no interest whatsoever in real visual storytelling here. Wake Up Dead Man is rumored to have cost $210 million, yet it somehow feels smaller than both of the previous entries, only finding what little energy it has in the edit. Johnson cuts with hard, pugilistic transitions, and rearranging information, playing a scene from one angle and then replaying it as if it were a YouTube video — sort of; one of the suspects is a vlogger but the restaged scenes still look like they were shot on an Alexa — adds a little to the intrigue.
At its best, which isn’t often, Wake Up Dead Man is a Rashomon for the digital era, one that retains the latter’s structural ingenuity and none of Kurosawa’s bottomless humanism. Only once, about midway through, does the movie slow down and let some air in: Father Jud halts everything to do some real pastoral work. It gets at the real value of faith, if only for a moment, but Johnson also can’t help but engorge on it and fold it back into the mystery, incorporating what little interest he has in faith into his argument for storytelling as the victor above all. That, for what it’s worth, comes across as an earnest plea.
By its conclusion, Wake Up Dead Man is actually not all that dissimilar from its streaming roommate Frankenstein: a genre formalist makes good via a stab at intellectual/emotional depth within his established mold — unsuccessfully. But where del Toro charged into it with full enthusiasm, Johnson wants to get back at Netflix with malicious compliance. It’s okay to be mad at Netflix — Lee, another suspect, delivers a (for Johnson) sharp barb in its direction during a heated debate about the future of the country — but watering down your franchise and making a last-minute call to sincerity to obscure your boredom with it is puny, and arrogant, when viewed in light of Todd Philips’ Pepé le Pew-style blow up of the Joker franchise in 2024. No, Johnson wants his cake and eats it too: when Blanc delivers the mystery’s solution, it’s as good as the word of the Lord. But “pride goeth before destruction,” King Solomon wrote in the book of Proverbs, “and a haughty spirit before a fall.”
DIRECTOR: Rian Johnson; CAST: Daniel Craig, Josh O’Connor, Jeremy Renner, Josh Brolin, Mila Kunis, Glenn Close; DISTRIBUTOR: Netflix; IN THEATERS: November 26; STREAMING: December 12; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 20 min.
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