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

The third Benoit Blanc mystery relocates the franchise from a Massachusetts manor and a Greek island to an upstate New York parish, a sensible choice for a series that has always preferred a closed circle of suspects to a wide world. Rian Johnson assembles his usual deep bench: Daniel Craig, Josh O'Connor as the boxer-turned-priest, Glenn Close, Josh Brolin, Kerry Washington, Andrew Scott, and Cailee Spaeny as a disabled cellist. The diversity of the ensemble is real and unremarked. Nobody pauses to explain it. Washington and McCormack arrive as parishioners, Spaeny plays her instrument, and the film proceeds with its business. That is representation by presence, not by argument, and it earns a middling mark for the same reason it earns one in any ledger: the faces are there, the thesis is not.

The plot concerns a missing inheritance, a diamond called Eve's Apple, and a congregation of the corrupt, which gives the film a taste for avarice and clerical hypocrisy. The target is personal greed and one bad shepherd, not an economic order. Geraldine Scott runs the local police, and several women drive the back half of the mystery, though the film never organizes itself around a critique of patriarchy. Racial identity goes unmentioned, and the film shows little interest in the rest of the contemporary inventory. Blanc remains a curious man in a nice coat, not a diagnosis.

The sermonizing is light. Johnson has said he wanted to explore faith without being moralistic, and the restraint mostly holds. What lingers is a soft homily about service and selflessness, delivered with a smile. The film is a well-built puzzle with a soulful streak and a modest appetite for cultural instruction. It wants to be liked, and it mostly is. The classification, for the record, is a sequel of uncommon polish and unremarkable conviction, which is its own kind of achievement in a season of louder sermons.