Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery Review is the first time the Knives Out franchise has actually felt alive to me. I’ve been pretty cool on these movies until now, but this one hits different. It’s heavier, stranger, more gothic, a murder mystery draped in church robes and moral decay. Rian Johnson trades glass mansions and sunlit satire for stained glass shadows and sermons dripping with hypocrisy. It plays like a confession wrapped in a crime story.

Benoit Blanc walks into a Southern parish where a priest’s death has cracked open a whole community. The air feels thick with guilt, lust, and righteousness. Johnson channels Martin McDonagh more than Agatha Christie this time, turning faith and politics into a darkly funny takedown of American self-delusion. There’s a biting MAGA undertone running through the congregation, but Johnson never flattens it into parody it’s just the water these characters swim in, and drown in.

Josh O’Connor is phenomenal, acting his guilt-ridden heart out as Reverend Jud Duplenticy, a young clergyman who’s all trembling sincerity and hidden sin. Every look feels like he’s begging to be forgiven for something we haven’t heard yet. Glenn Close steals scenes as the church’s benefactor, a woman who knows exactly how to turn morality into control. She plays it with that effortless authority that makes her a likely Supporting Actress contender.

The filmmaking is striking candlelight flickering on stone, choirs echoing like ghosts. Johnson stages everything with this mournful, southern-gothic energy that keeps you uneasy even when nothing violent is happening. There’s humor, but it’s the dry, cracked kind, the laugh you let out when you recognize something ugly and true.

What makes it the best of the three is how the mystery isn’t really the point. The twist is sharp, sure, but the real suspense is spiritual. It’s about how people hide behind faith, how guilt becomes currency, how atonement feels impossible in a world that has forgotten what grace even means.

Wake Up Dead Man is Johnson at his most daring, turning the Knives Out formula inside out until it becomes something bruised, soulful, and strange. The real mystery isn’t the killer — it’s how to keep believing in forgiveness when everyone’s already been damned. [B+]