Wake Up Dead Man

• 1. Introduction

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  Wake Up Dead Man, the 2025 American mystery written and directed by Rian Johnson, turns a Good Friday service into a crime scene. Monsignor Jefferson Wicks collapses inside a closet beside the chancel, and a knife fashioned from a red devil's-head lamp finial is found in his back. It is the third film in the Knives Out series, and Daniel Craig returns as the master detective Benoit Blanc.

  Several questions hang over that closet. Who could have reached the monsignor there? Who gained from his death? And what secrets does this parish hold that a detective must dig up before the truth comes out?

  The answers begin with the newest priest to arrive at that church.

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• 2. A Boxer in the Pulpit

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  A punch thrown at a fellow deacon is what lands Jud Duplenticy in trouble. He is a former boxer who became a Catholic priest, and his superiors reassign him to Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude, a parish in upstate New York.

  Monsignor Jefferson Wicks runs the parish, and he is the grandson of Reverend Prentice Wicks. Jud soon learns that Prentice gathered a small fortune before he died. Jefferson's troubled mother, Grace, stayed on at the church in the hope that the inheritance would come to her. When the money went missing, she tore through the building and destroyed its crucifix.

  Incendiary sermons from Wicks have driven nearly everyone out of the pews. Only his most loyal and corrupt parishioners remain, and Jud openly disdains the way Wicks rules over them.

  On the day before Good Friday, Jud drunkenly carried a stolen lamp finial out of a bar. It is identical to the one found in Wicks' back. Add the threats Jud had made against Wicks, and the new priest becomes the main suspect in a locked-room mystery.

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• 3. The Locked Room

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  Police chief Geraldine Scott is the one who summons Benoit Blanc to the parish. Blanc, convinced that Jud is innocent, recruits him as an assistant.

  Wicks is entombed in Prentice's mausoleum, and then the two men question the congregation. They learn that Wicks claimed to have found Prentice's fortune. He planned to spend it on a political career alongside Cy Draven, his illegitimate son. Cy also revealed a darker plan. Wicks intended to close the church after publicly shaming his followers and exposing their secrets.

  Tired of Blanc's dogged pursuit of justice, Jud quits the investigation. That same night he apparently sees Wicks walk out of the mausoleum and embrace the groundskeeper, Samson. Jud chases them and is knocked out. He wakes beside Samson's corpse, believing that he is the killer.

  Blanc stops Jud from turning himself in. Instead he takes him to the house of a parish member, Nat Sharp. There they find Nat's corpse dissolving in a bathtub of acid, lying next to Wicks' body.

  The next morning the police and parishioners gather in the church to hear Jud confess. Blanc instead announces that Nat killed Wicks. An accomplice pinned a decoy finial to Wicks' matching red vestment and spiked his flask with sedatives. Wicks routinely drank during services, so he passed out. Fake blood, released by remote control from the decoy, made it look as if he had been stabbed. Nat then pretended to examine the body, swapped the decoy for the real knife and delivered the fatal wound.

  Before he can go on, Blanc seems to have an epiphany. He abruptly declares that he cannot explain what happened, and the congregation leaves. The accomplice who rigged the decoy has still not been named.

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• 4. Eve's Apple

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  Blanc later says he was inspired by Jud's example, and that he deliberately left room for the killer to come forward. The person who does is Martha, the church's longtime secretary.

  Martha knew that Prentice had converted his entire fortune into a single diamond he called "Eve's Apple". Prentice then took his own life by swallowing it. Grace ransacked the church searching for it, never knowing where it had gone. Martha had watched Prentice's final act and stayed silent until her last confession with Wicks. She was terrified when she realized that Wicks would recover the diamond from his grandfather's corpse. So she conspired with Nat to kill him first.

  After Wicks died, Martha had Samson sealed in the mausoleum in his place, so that he could retrieve and destroy the diamond. Samson found it, then walked out of the tomb dressed as Wicks. The staged resurrection was meant to protect Wicks' legacy and the reputation of the church. Nat dressed as Samson and waited outside. When Jud arrived, Nat killed Samson to keep Eve's Apple for himself.

  Nat then poisoned Martha's coffee with pentobarbital. She swapped their cups without his noticing, and he died instead. Finally Martha reveals that she has swallowed poison herself. She collapses and prays for forgiveness from all her victims, Grace included. Jud absolves her before she dies, and with her last act she reveals Eve's Apple to Blanc and Jud.

  One year later, Jud has carved a new crucifix and is about to reopen the church under a new name, Our Lady of Perpetual Grace. Cy, convinced that Jud is hiding the diamond, vows to watch his finances for any trace of it. As new parishioners file in for Jud's first Mass, the camera shows Eve's Apple hidden inside the chest of the new crucifix.

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• 5. Blueprints and a Title

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  Edgar Allan Poe and John Dickson Carr are the writers Rian Johnson names as his key influences. Agatha Christie also leaves her mark, especially through her 1939 novel And Then There Were None. Carr's 1935 book The Hollow Man is referenced repeatedly inside the film. For the flashbacks in which Grace Wicks wrecks the church, Johnson looked to Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 film Bram Stoker's Dracula.

  Johnson grew up in Evangelicalism, and that background feeds the story. The atheist Blanc reflects Johnson's own feelings about organized religion. Yet he picked Catholicism for the setting on purely visual grounds. He said the churches he grew up in "kind of looked like Pottery Barns", which made them a poor basis for the film's look.

  Even before Knives Out reached audiences in 2019, Johnson said he wanted sequels in which Blanc investigates new mysteries. He already had an idea for a new film. In June 2022 he revealed that Knives Out 3 was only a working title. Following Christie's example, he wanted each film to carry its own distinct title.

  Johnson said in November 2022 that he was preparing to write the third film. By January 2023 he confirmed that the script was underway and promised it would be tonally and thematically different from the earlier installments. He had approved the subtitle A Knives Out Mystery for the previous film, but he now wanted to rename the series and add A Benoit Blanc Mystery to future ones.

  The 2023 Writers Guild of America strike interrupted the work. In October 2023, after it was resolved, Johnson announced that he had started on the script. He said the premise was already planned, and he could begin writing again.

  The title itself comes from a phrase in the folk song "Ain't No More Cane on the Brazos". Johnson adds that it is also "kind of" derived from the U2 song of the same name.

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• 6. Cast and Cameras

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  On the 31st of March 2021, it was reported that Netflix had bought the rights to two Knives Out sequels for over $400 million. Daniel Craig had shown interest in returning early in the development. He was paid $100 million for his work on the two sequels.

  In May 2024, Josh O'Connor, Cailee Spaeny, Andrew Scott, Kerry Washington, Glenn Close, Jeremy Renner, Mila Kunis and Daryl McCormack joined the main cast. Josh Brolin and Thomas Haden Church followed the next month. Renner's likeness had already appeared in the earlier film Glass Onion, though he had not otherwise been featured in it.

  Principal photography began on the 10th of June 2024 in London. Johnson's regular collaborators returned, with Steve Yedlin as cinematographer and Nathan Johnson as composer. First-look set photos showed Blanc with a noticeably longer hairstyle than in the previous films.

  On the 19th of June 2024, Glenn Close revealed she was "really hit hard" by both COVID-19 and respiratory syncytial virus, known as RSV. By then she had been able to take part in only two days of filming. Shooting was completed on the 17th of August.

  The church exteriors, though set in New York state, were filmed in England at the Church of the Holy Innocents in High Beach, Epping Forest. More exterior footage was shot in September 2024 in Cold Spring, New York, which doubled as the town of Chimney Rock.

  The cast also posed in costume for the English painter Isabella Watling, whose portraits of the main characters appear in the end credits. Nathan Johnson's soundtrack was released on the 28th of November 2025.

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• 7. Reception

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  The Toronto International Film Festival hosted the world premiere of Wake Up Dead Man on the 6th of September 2025. The international premiere followed at the BFI London Film Festival on the 8th of October 2025. Select theaters began showing the film on the 26th of November, and Netflix streamed it from the 12th of December.

  Reviews were generally positive, as they had been for the earlier films in the series. Most of the praise went to the performances, particularly those of Craig and O'Connor.

  Damon Wise of Deadline wrote that the film "may be the best one yet" in the franchise, crediting its more introspective nature. On the German arthouse portal Programmkino.de, Dieter Oßwald praised the characters, the tension and the twists. He called Craig "brilliant" with "a screen presence that exudes effortless cool." Alissa Wilkinson of The New York Times wrote that the film works because "Father Jud and Benoit Blanc are two peas in a pod, when it comes right down to brass tacks."

  The film's treatment of Catholicism split reviewers. Some responded with enthusiasm, while others found aspects of it unbelievable.

  Awards bodies took notice. Glenn Close appears in supporting actress categories at the AACTA International Awards, the Astra Film Awards, the Kansas City Film Critics Circle, the New York Film Critics Online and the St. Louis Film Critics Association. Josh O'Connor was listed for supporting actor at the Astra Film Awards and the Kansas City Film Critics Circle. The Saturn Awards listed the film for Best Thriller Movie on the 8th of March 2026.

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• 8. Another Case

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  In September 2022, Rian Johnson confirmed that he intended to make more films in the series. Later that month, he and Craig each said separately that they would keep going, provided both were involved.

  By October 2025, Johnson said he had nothing planned for a fourth film. He was still willing to make one as long as he and Craig have fun and audiences enjoy the results. He described the films as challenging to make, especially when it comes to developing new plots.

  That position shifted within weeks. In November 2025 it was announced that Johnson and Craig were "starting to formulate ideas" for a possible fourth Knives Out movie. In January 2026, Johnson said he had "some basic, elemental, conceptual ideas".

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