Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery [Movie Review]

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery [Movie Review] | Finally, another Knives Out mystery.

I loved the first two, so this was a must-watch. Does it live up to them?

SYNOPSIS

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (2025) Trivia

• Starring: Daniel Craig, Josh O'Connor, Glenn Close, Josh Brolin, Mila Kunis, Jeremy Renner, Kerry Washington, Andrew Scott, Cailee Spaeny, Daryl McCormack, Thomas & Haden Church
• Director: Rian Johnson
• Producer: Ram Bergman& Rian Johnson
• Production Company: T-Street Productions & Ram Bergman Productions
• Distributed by: Netflix
• Release date: December 12, 2025
• Running time: 144 minutes
• Rating: MA
• Country: United States
• Language: English
• IMDb: 7.4/ 10
• Tomatometer: 92%
• Metascore: 80%
• Tiny details—props, color choices, even character positioning—quietly reveal the truth long before the final reveal. On a rewatch, it feels like the film was giving everything away all along. 
• The exterior of Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude was filmed at Holy Innocents Church in Epping Forest, near London. The church’s real-life vicar, Reverend Jane Yeadon, was so involved during filming that Mila Kunis reportedly mistook her for an extra. 
• This marked Jeremy Renner’s first film appearance since his near-fatal snowplow accident in 2023. 
• Daniel Craig always appears alongside at least one actor he previously worked with in a James Bond movie. Knives Out featured Ana de Armas from No Time to Die. Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery reunited him with Dave Bautista from Spectre. Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery continues the pattern with Andrew Scott and Jeffrey Wright, both familiar faces from Craig’s Bond era. 

Jud did not plan to become a parish problem. A former boxer turned Catholic priest, he traded fists for faith, only to discover that the Church, like the ring, has its own bruising politics. 

After punching a deacon who mistook rudeness for righteousness, Jud is quietly reassigned to Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude, a decaying parish in upstate New York presided over by the volatile Monsignor Jefferson Wicks. Wicks is a man shaped by bitterness. He is the heir to a vanished fortune, son of a mother broken by disappointment and preacher to a shrinking congregation that thrives more on fear than faith. Even the church crucifix remains shattered, an absence Wicks refuses to mend.

Jud clashes with Wicks almost immediately. The sermons burn, the air is tense and then, on Good Friday, the unthinkable happens. Wicks collapses behind the altar, stabbed with a blade fashioned from a red devil-head lamp finial. The murder appears impossible. Worse, Jud once drunkenly hurled that very finial through a bar window. Suspicion settles on him like ash.

Benoit Blanc, summoned by the town’s police chief and armed with a maddening patience for truth, visited the murder scene. Certain of Jud’s innocence, Blanc pulls him into the investigation. As secrets unravel, the parish reveals itself as a nest of buried motives. Wicks had claimed to recover his grandfather’s lost fortune and planned to leverage it for political power, humiliating his own followers along the way. Before answers surface, Jud walks away, exhausted by justice that feels more like spectacle.

Then things grow stranger. Jud glimpses Wicks alive, exiting a mausoleum. Bodies appear. Guilt blooms. Truth dissolves, almost literally, in a bathtub of acid. At what seems like the story’s end, Blanc offers an explanation and then retracts it, allowing silence to do what interrogation cannot.

Who, what and why did Wick died? 

MY REVIEW

What I Like:  

• Loved it! As witty, clever and funny as the first two. 
• Beautiful performance by the cast. 

What I Don't Like:

• Tend to be a bit draggy in some scenes 

Will I Watch It Again: Sure, I would.

Overall: 4.6/ 5.0

The pictures are taken from multiple sources on the Internet. Thank you.

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