6 min read
The following story contains spoilers for Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery.
THERE MAY NOT be a more cathartic, rewarding experience in modern movies than watching Benoit Blanc investigate his way to the bottom of a mystery. Daniel Craig’s Foghorn Leghorn-accented detective returns for the third time in a Rian Johnson whodunit film with Netflix’s Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, a film that’s decidedly more gothic and dark than the tropical setting of 2021’s Glass Onion and the original 2019 Knives Out.
The fantastic Josh O’Connor steps into the shoes of our non-Craig lead, following in the footsteps of Ana de Armas (in Knives Out) and Janelle Monae (in Glass Onion). O’Connor has been a phenomenal talent on the rise in the last few years—particularly his performance in 2024’s Challengers—and his role as boxer-turned-priest Jud Duplenticy puts a major cap on what’s been a fantastic year for him (which has also included appearances in The Mastermind, The History of Sound, and Rebuilding).
In fact, Craig doesn’t even appear until 40 minutes into the movie. Johnson trusts O’Connor for the first act to serve our narrator and entry to the story, and to provide the framing for what will become the film’s basic premise and mystery. As it goes: Jud has recently been relocated to a church in a small upstate New York town after getting in some trouble punching out a rude deacon. At his new church, he meets and becomes the #2 guy to Monsignor Jefferson Wicks, a charismatic guy and gifted orator who is also a huge dick with terrible vibes and negative energy. Wicks is played with a perfect amount of menace by Josh Brolin (who’s having his own great year following appearances in Weapons and The Running Man).
Wicks’s intense negativity is offputting to many, but the charisma he rolls that negativity up in is strong enough to hold his long-time right hand woman named Martha (Glenn Close), and attract a group of loyal followers. This group includes Dr. Nat Sharp (Jeremy Renner), local lawyer Vera Draven (Kerry Washington), Vera’s adoptive son and failed conservative politician Cy Draven (Daryl McCormack), author Lee Ross (Andrew Scott), a world-class cellist struggling with chronic pain named Simone Vivane (Cailee Spaeny), and church groundskeeper Samson Holt (Thomas Haden Church). The group not only attends every Wicks sermon, but feels a strong sense of loyalty to him that only gets stronger when they see someone else walk out of one of his hot-headed rants, and they decide to stay.
Jud takes particular issue with Wicks, letting him know that he doesn’t like the way he goes about things or the way he attempts to influence people through hate and negativity. He tells Wicks that he’s making it his goal to end him once and for all. And then, one day during a sermon, Wicks walks into a small room to the left of his podium, and drops dead. Jud goes to find him, and finds that he’s covered in blood, having been stabbed in the back. A huge shock for all—and especially to those who know that the room Wicks had entered had no doors, no windows, and was just made of concrete walls.
As Blanc eventually declares, it’s a seemingly impossible crime.
So who is the killer in Wake Up Dead Man? What really happened?
Throughout the course of Wake Up Dead Man, several events occur that would seemingly need to have been some sort of miracle to actually have happened. And as any master mystery solver would need to be, Blanc declares time and time again that he doesn’t believe in that kind of thing—he’s a devout skeptic. And so, with much trouble, Blanc does get to the bottom of the case.
In a vacuum, Wicks was killed by Dr. Nat Sharp (Maybe when it comes to Knives Out movies we should start paying attention to any actors who have previously played Marvel Cinematic Universe superheroes as immediate main suspects). But there’s a whole lot more to the story than just that. To put it as simply as possible, Wicks has a long family history that revolves around his mother, known in tales as “The Harlot Whore.” Wicks’s grandfather had a vast family fortune that was eventually lost (in another mystery), and “The Harlot Whore” seemingly tore the church up in a rage—breaking the crucifix, which was never repaired—when the fortune was gone.
But in actuality, we later learn via flashback, Wicks’s grandfather blamed the evil and sin in the world on money, and had his vast fortune exchanged for one super valuable diamond—which he swallowed before his death in front of a young Martha.
For the rest of the conspiracy we must flash back to the present. Wicks figured out what really happened with the diamond, and Cy found out that he was actually Wicks’s illegitimate son (long story); The two then planned to use Cy’s political machine and social media influence to turn him into a possibly influential candidate.
As a result, Wicks was going to get out of the church game—and so he cut ties with all of his loyal followers, threatening to ruin and expose all of them. One of these was Dr. Nat, who Wicks was going to expose for being an alcoholic, often even performing his medical duties while drunk. This would ruin Dr. Nat.
Martha, seeing how the money was corrupting Wicks exactly how his grandfather suspected it would corrupt anyone, hatched a plan with the desperate Nat to take Wicks out. Nat put a powerful sedative into Wicks’s secret flask, and then when he passed out, he stabbed him with a Devil-headed dagger (which had previously been on his back via a switch-operated, fake blood-soaked switcheroo), replacing the fake dagger that was already in there.
Martha and Nat’s next part of the plan involved faking Wicks’s return to life, which they planned to film and put online to return hope to the local religious community. Samson the groundskeeper would take Wicks’s place in the coffin, and he would rise, exit the crypt (looking like Wicks), and make people believe that the Monsignor had returned from the dead. Wake Up Dead Man, indeed.
Except there was one major problem—when Samson emerged from the crypt and met Dr. Nat in the rainy woods, Nat too was overtaken by the greed and temptation of the priceless diamond, and he killed Samson with a hook.
Martha, knowing how the plan had gone awry, returned to Dr. Nat’s house, where they had planned to dispose of Wicks’s body in a tub filled with acid. Knowing that Nat would plan to poison her and take her out, Martha switched their cups, and when Dr. Nat drank the poison and passed out, she put him into the tub and, well, melted all of his skin down to nothing. With Wicks’s arms in the tub making it appear like some kind of struggle.
As he does, Blanc managed to figure this all out (and despite his belief that he was involved at some level and urge to confess, Jud was 100% innocent). But he allowed Martha to come forward and confess to all of her involvement, and beg for forgiveness—which Jud granted her just before she too died. She’d taken more of the poison, sealing her fate with Wicks, Dr. Nat, and Sampson.
What a twisty story! Wake Up Dead Man certainly has the highest body count of any Knives Out mystery to date.
What happened to Wicks’s diamond?
Wicks’s priceless family diamond is the final lasting mystery in Wake Up Dead Man. Cy, now knowing that he’s Wicks’s son, believes that the fortune of the jewel is rightfully his. But knowing how much of an evil douchebag Cy is, neither Jud nor Blanc have any particular plans to let him know where it is or even where it might be.
Of course, we know that Jud does have it, because he saw it fall out of Martha’s hands as she died. With Cy threatening Blanc and Jud constantly, Jud can’t exactly splurge and buy a Corvette or build a brand new church. But he can keep it as a vital symbol of everything that he and that church—now named Our Lady of Perpetual Grace, for “The Harlot Whore”‘s real name—have been through. And as the final shot of the film reveals, the diamond is comfortably sitting right inside the church’s brand new, finally properly functioning crucifix.
Watch Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery Here
Evan is the culture editor for Men’s Health, with bylines in The New York Times, MTV News, Brooklyn Magazine, and VICE. He loves weird movies, watches too much TV, and listens to music more often than he doesn’t.
