TL;DR: A darker, more traditional Knives Out sequel that dials back the gimmicks, delivers a solid mystery, and reminds us why Benoit Blanc works—just don’t expect every supporting character to get their moment.

I went into Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery with a chip on my shoulder. Not the fun kind, either—the kind you get after a franchise you mostly adore lets you down once and you start wondering if the magic trick has already been explained. I liked Knives Out a lot. Loved it, even. Glass Onion, though? That one and I still don’t make eye contact at parties. So when Rian Johnson announced he was bringing Benoit Blanc back again, this time with a title that sounds like a lost Nick Cave B-side and a vaguely ominous promise of “going darker,” I braced myself. I wanted to be surprised, but I didn’t trust the movie to do it.

To my genuine relief, Wake Up Dead Man doesn’t try to outsmart me. It doesn’t wink every five minutes. It doesn’t detonate its own mystery halfway through just to prove how clever it is. Instead, it does something almost radical for this series: it tells an actual murder mystery, played mostly straight, with sincerity, patience, and a surprisingly reverent mood. And for the first time since Benoit Blanc first drawled his way into our lives, I felt like the series had remembered why this character works in the first place.

The biggest tonal shift hits immediately. Wake Up Dead Man opens not with Daniel Craig chewing scenery, but with Josh O’Connor’s Reverend Jud Duplencity, a young priest whose eyes always seem one bad conversation away from collapsing inward. He’s been assigned to a small, deeply insular parish run by Monsignor Jefferson Wicks, played by Josh Brolin with a kind of righteous menace that feels both ancient and painfully modern. Wicks isn’t just domineering; he’s corrosive. The kind of religious authority figure who mistakes cruelty for conviction and control for faith. Watching him preside over his flock feels less like attending church and more like sitting in on a slow, spiritual hostage situation.

When Wicks is found dead after a sermon, a blade inexplicably lodged in his back, the movie leans hard into atmosphere. This is a locked-room murder without the locked room, a crime that seems physically impossible in a space defined by ritual and routine. Suspicion immediately circles Jud, because of course it does. He’s the outsider. He’s the one who openly bristled at Wicks’ authority. And he’s the one who looks like he might actually feel guilt even if he didn’t do anything wrong.

Only after all of this does Benoit Blanc arrive, and that delay matters. By the time Craig enters the frame—still unmistakably Blanc, still musical in that foghorn Southern cadence—the movie has already established its soul. This isn’t a playground for rich idiots or a satire of tech-world narcissism. This is a story about power, belief, and what happens when a community built on moral certainty starts to rot from the inside.

As someone who has generally been on board with Rian Johnson’s filmography, this felt like a course correction I didn’t know how badly I wanted. Wake Up Dead Man doesn’t hit the emotional highs of the original Knives Out—Ana de Armas’ Marta is still the beating heart of this franchise—but Josh O’Connor comes closer than anyone else has. His performance is quiet, restrained, and full of micro-cracks. You can see Jud’s faith buckling under pressure, not in grand speeches, but in the way he hesitates before answering simple questions. It’s compelling in a way that doesn’t beg for applause.

And the mystery itself? It’s good. Actually good. Not “good for a Netflix movie” or “good if you don’t think about it too hard,” but genuinely well-constructed. The solution isn’t obvious, the mechanics of the murder are clever without being goofy, and the film trusts the audience to keep up without constantly explaining the joke. I found myself leaning forward instead of leaning back, which is the highest compliment I can give a whodunnit.

Visually, Wake Up Dead Man might be the most confident this series has ever looked. Johnson and longtime cinematographer Steve Yedlin continue their streak of making every project feel meticulously composed without feeling sterile. The marketing leaned heavily on a so-called “Gothic” influence, and while that’s overstated, the film does bathe itself in earthy greens, browns, and shadowy interiors that make the parish feel both cozy and claustrophobic. Early on, the church feels warm, familiar, even safe. As the story darkens, that same space starts to feel violated, as if something sacred has been fundamentally disturbed. It’s a smart visual metaphor, and one of the film’s strongest storytelling tools.

Daniel Craig, for his part, remains effortlessly watchable. Benoit Blanc is still an odd duck, still prone to metaphor and theatrical pauses, but he’s less of a caricature here than he was in Glass Onion. There’s a seriousness to him that suits the material, and Craig seems more interested in listening than performing. That said, this is once again a movie where Blanc shines brightest simply because so many other characters are left standing in the background, waiting for a turn that never really comes.

And this is where Wake Up Dead Man stumbles. Rian Johnson has a habit of assembling casts so stacked they look like award-season bingo cards, and then not knowing what to do with half of them. Kerry Washington, Andrew Scott, and Cailee Spaeny all appear, all suggest intriguing inner lives, and all more or less vanish into the margins once the plot gets moving. It’s especially frustrating because every member of the parish is given at least a whisper of motive. The groundwork is there. The movie just doesn’t follow through, leaving several potentially fascinating characters stranded as thematic furniture.

Johnson also hasn’t entirely shaken his fondness for meta humor. There are a handful of cheeky references—to Star Wars, to Netflix itself, to classic mystery literature—that feel more like the director nudging the audience than characters behaving like real people. None of it ruins the film, but it does briefly puncture the illusion. In a story this moody and contained, those winks stand out more than they probably should.

Still, the larger achievement here is restraint. After Knives Out upended the genre and Glass Onion tried (and failed) to remix it again, Wake Up Dead Man settles into something closer to tradition. It respects the rules. It understands why murder mysteries endure. And it trusts that tension, character, and structure are enough without constant gimmickry. That choice alone makes it feel like the healthiest entry in the series since the beginning.

By the time the credits rolled, I realized something else: I’d missed Benoit Blanc when he’s allowed to be part of a story instead of the punchline. Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery isn’t the best film in the franchise, but it’s the one that reassured me this series still has a reason to exist.

Verdict

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery brings the franchise back to basics with a grounded, moody, and genuinely engaging whodunnit that values atmosphere and puzzle-solving over smug subversion. While its overloaded cast remains underused, strong performances from Josh O’Connor, Josh Brolin, and a more restrained Daniel Craig anchor the film. It may not eclipse the original Knives Out, but it proves Benoit Blanc still has worthwhile cases ahead of him.