With Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, Rian Johnson takes his whodunnit franchise somewhere even deadlier than a billionaire’s island or a tech bro’s compound: a small-town Catholic parish. Streaming on Netflix as of December 12, 2025, the third Knives Out film follows Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc into a world where faith, hypocrisy, and an apparently “perfectly impossible crime” collide.
The story unfolds in the fictional upstate New York town of Chimney Rock, at a parish called Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude. A young boxer-turned-priest, a vulgar monsignor, and a gallery of parishioners – a church lady, groundskeeper, lawyer, aspiring politician, doctor, writer, and cellist – all become suspects once blood is spilled inside the church. Drawing on his own Christian background and the help of a Catholic consultant priest, Johnson turns this locked-room case into a meditation on mercy and belief.
Release date, runtime, rating, and where to watch Wake Up Dead Man
Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery is available to stream worldwide on Netflix beginning December 12, 2025. OSV News describes it as a “nearly two-and-a-half hour” film and notes that the Motion Picture Association rating is PG-13, “parents strongly cautioned,” with a warning that “some material may be inappropriate for children under 13.” OSV classifies the movie as L — “limited adult audience, films whose problematic content many adults would find troubling” — citing violent content, bloody images, strong language, some crude sexual material, and smoking.
Johnson has called the film “a big, fun, Benoit Blanc murder mystery that’s still kind of a big tent entertainment,” but he also wanted “a multi-faceted conversation” with himself about faith. He says the topic is “both what faith was personally to me and also its place in the culture right now — and can it feel like it’s talking ‘about it’ as opposed to ‘at it’ in a big Hollywood movie.”
Wake Up Dead Man cast: every suspect in the parish
The Wake Up Dead Man cast might be the most loaded ensemble yet in this series, and the parish is packed with potential killers. If you are looking up the Wake Up Dead Man cast or trying to remember the cast of Knives Out 3, these are the central players.
- Daniel Craig as Benoit Blanc – The returning Southern sleuth anchors the Knives Out cast again. Blanc proudly considers himself a “proud heretic” who kneels at “the altar of the rational,” yet this case forces him to take faith seriously when murder desecrates a sanctuary.
- Josh O’Connor as Father Jud Duplenticy – A former boxer turned priest, Father Jud is the earnest young cleric assigned to Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude. At one point he is described as “young, dumb, and full of Christ.” He insists that all he wants is to be a good priest and to show broken people “the love and forgiveness of Christ,” adding that the world “needs that so bad.”
- Josh Brolin as Msgr. Jefferson Wicks – Wicks is the parish’s vulgar, fire-and-brimstone pastor, fond of walkouts and public shaming. After a Good Friday homily, he is stabbed to death in a side alcove out of sight from the congregation, leaving Blanc to solve what he calls a “perfectly impossible crime.”
- Glenn Close as Martha Delacroix – A devoted church lady tied closely to the parish, Martha is part of the inner circle at Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude and a key face in the Knives Out 3 cast.
- Jeremy Renner as Dr. Nat Sharp – The local doctor, drinking himself into despair after his wife leaves him. His proximity to the parish and barely concealed misery make him an obvious suspect.
- Andrew Scott as Lee Ross – A best-selling author and “self-professed recovering liberal” who has written a dense book about Wicks. His fixation on the monsignor, and his decision to turn it into content, put him squarely in Blanc’s sights.
- Cailee Spaeny as Simone Vivane – A gifted cellist suffering from chronic pain. Like many parishioners, she is both beholden to the church and bruised by it, and her artistry hides deeper secrets.
- Kerry Washington as Vera Draven – A high-strung lawyer who has adopted a son, Vera moves through the parish with sharp elbows and sharper instincts, letting legal maneuvering become part of the mystery.
- Daryl McCormack as Cy – Vera’s adoptive son, an opportunistic, social-media-savvy aspiring politician with Republican ambitions. He is eager to use the case to raise his profile even as suspicion swirls around him.
- Mila Kunis – Another key figure among the parish power players, aligning her with the local authorities who sometimes help Blanc and sometimes get in his way.
- Thomas Haden Church – As the groundskeeper, he represents the working-class presence on church property. He knows the physical space too well to be ignored in any theory of the crime.
These are just the most prominent faces. Johnson and Netflix fill out the new Knives Out movie with a broader community of parishioners, family members, and hangers-on, expanding the Knives Out 3 cast into a full ecosystem of suspects. Blanc’s past foes, including the Thrombeys of Knives Out and the tech elite in Glass Onion, are echoed only in passing as the detective faces a very different kind of power structure.
A locked-room mystery with God in the details
Johnson has always loved classic detective fiction, and this case leans into that tradition. At one point, Blanc consults John Dickson Carr’s 1935 novel The Three Coffins (known in Britain as The Hollow Man) and the famous “Locked-Room Lecture” by Dr. Gideon Fell. Fell’s line — “We’re in a detective story, and we don’t fool the reader by pretending we’re not” — might as well be the movie’s mission statement.
The impossible crime is the killing of Msgr. Wicks, after his Good Friday sermon, in an alcove that functions as a hermetically sealed chamber. Parishioners packed into the pews never see the fatal moment. By the time the lights come up, their pastor is dead, and almost everyone has something to hide. Blanc has to figure out how anyone could enter and exit unseen, and why so many people who preach mercy nurse such deep resentments.
Visually, Johnson leans into Catholic aesthetics. He has said he is drawn to the beauty of Catholicism and to the way Catholics have “mastered visual storytelling.” One of the first conversations between Blanc and Jud about religion centers on “the notion of storytelling,” not as a lie but as “the way that we, as humans, kind of sort and understand the un-understandable.” Stained glass, statues, and sacristy details all become part of the mystery’s architecture.
To make those details ring true, Johnson invited his Catholic aunt and uncle to dinner while working on the script and asked them to bring their pastor, Father Scott Bailey of Risen Christ Catholic Parish in Denver, along with other priests. Johnson remembers that “it was wonderful, because we had a great dinner, and it was kind of an Ask-Me-Anything session. I got to just kind of talk to them about what their lives are like.” Father Bailey went on to serve as a consultant, advising on vestments, sanctuary layout, and even the objects that would sit on a priest’s desk.
Faith, mercy, and the politics of the pulpit
Although Johnson says he is no longer religious, his background matters. “I grew up Protestant, sort of evangelical. I was a youth group kid, but I wasn’t just in a church family. I was really, deeply, personally Christian up through my early 20s,” he explains. Initially, he struggled to write Father Jud because he was approaching him from “the perspective of where I’m at, of myself today,” and realized instead that “you have to really write through that character’s eyes.”
That shift gives the film its emotional core. Father Jud may be flawed, but he is tender with parishioners and committed to a ministry rooted in mercy. Father Bailey says he could see their conversations reflected in Jud’s gentleness and points to the priest’s desire to show people “the love and forgiveness of Christ.” Bailey concedes that “there’s some stuff in the very beginning, kind of the exposition piece, that can be uncomfortable,” but adds that “things get redeemed along the way.” He notes, “you don’t often find a message of mercy embedded in a murder mystery, and there is that … there’s so much in terms of mercy.”
The movie also interrogates how Christians meet the wider world. Bailey frames a central question: “Are we willing to meet the world where the world is and invite the world in and present Christ? Or are we always going to treat the world as … if you’re not on board, then you’re against us.” That tension hangs over Wicks’s weaponized sermons and over Blanc, a skeptic who nonetheless learns from Jud’s example.
Roxana Hadadi writes that Wake Up Dead Man “shakes off the franchise’s winking timeliness and instead embraces a timeless foe: asshole Christians — those who use their pulpits to attack all whose faith doesn’t quite align with their own; those who rely on hate and divisiveness instead of charity and love.” She even jokes that “our new Chicago pope would love this movie, and he’d probably be upset it’s not in theaters for longer. So am I.” The line captures how the movie skewers bad religion while still insisting that another way is possible.
Blanc himself stays on the “opposite side of the fence” of faith. Johnson says the detective remains a “proud heretic,” a man who still kneels at “the altar of the rational.” Yet by the end he sacrifices something essential to him because of what he learns from Father Jud. Their friendship becomes a meeting point between belief and doubt that Johnson calls “a beautiful thing,” even if it never turns into a conversion story.
Critical reception and where Wake Up Dead Man sits in the Knives Out trilogy
As a piece of pop entertainment, Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery is landing as both a sharp puzzle and a bold spiritual sequel. PinkNews followed its Rotten Tomatoes journey, first noting a perfect 100% score from just 11 reviews, then reporting that “Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery has 96% on Rotten Tomatoes,” and later pointing out that with 235 reviews it still held a “very impressive 93%.” Whatever the exact number on any given day, the new Knives Out movie is clearly connecting with critics.
At the Boston Globe, critic Odie Henderson gave the film four stars out of four and called it “one of the year’s best movies.” “I’ve enjoyed all three movies, but this one is the best of the Knives Out mysteries so far,” he writes. Henderson adds that Blanc’s struggle with the case pays off: “His inability to land on a solution makes Benoit Blanc insecure, and it opens up new layers for Craig to play, and the resulting tension keeps us on our toes.”
Placed alongside the earlier films — Knives Out in 2019 and Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery in 2022 — this third outing feels distinct. The first movie, set among the feuding Thrombey family, earned more than three hundred million dollars worldwide and introduced Blanc as a modern sleuth. The second moved to a Greek island and skewered tech culture. Wake Up Dead Man instead focuses on the pulpit, the confessional, and the gap between public piety and private sin, while still serving up the twisty pleasures viewers expect from the Knives Out 3 cast.
Johnson’s love of crime fiction runs throughout, with nods to writers like G.K. Chesterton, Dorothy L. Sayers, and P.D. James, who treated detection as a moral exercise. In that sense, Wake Up Dead Man feels like a natural next step for the franchise. Benoit Blanc still cracks jokes and monologues about clues, but the stakes have shifted to what mercy looks like in a broken world. For Netflix subscribers cueing up Wake Up Dead Man on release weekend, that mix of star power, theological tension, and intricate plotting makes this one of Benoit Blanc’s most memorable cases yet.
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