Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (A PopEntertainment.com Movie Review)

Wake Up Dead Man - A Knives Out Mystery

WAKE UP DEAD MAN – A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY (2025)

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, Jeffrey Wright, Annie Hamilton, James Faulkner, Bridget Everett, Noah Segan, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Jamie Karitzis, Kit Burden, Gavin Spokes, Paul Hilton, Ray Bolton and Nicola Hughes.

Screenplay by  Rian Johnson.

Directed by Rian Johnson.

Distributed by Netflix. 144 minutes. Rated PG-13.

Screened at the 2025 Philadelphia Film Festival.

Wake Up Dead Man is the third entry in Rian Johnson’s Knives Out series. Now having seen three chapters of the story, one thing has become quite clear. Each of the films are substantially different – in style, tone, shooting techniques, atmosphere, setting. The only things the films really have in common are the creator, the fact that they are a comic modern view of classic mystery tropes (and some of the movies are funnier than others) and a single character, super-sleuth Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig).

Well, maybe they have a bit more in common than that. As writer/director Johnson told me a couple of years ago on the release of the second film, Glass Onion, “This is why I love the genre – you think about [the story]. You get a good mystery. You get a rogue's gallery of interesting characters, all trying to kill each other. You get a charismatic detective at the center of it. What's not what's not to love? It's the most fun you can have [while] telling a story.”

True enough. And Johnson has been quite open about the fact that he had at least partially based the films on the mystery novels of Agatha Christie. In fact, he said to me in that discussion, “I was thinking about the Agatha Christie movies that were coming out back in the 70s – and her books.”

The very prolific Christie (she wrote about 80 books, plays, poetry books, autobiographies and short-story collections in a career of less than 60 years) was known for changing her characters, her story styles, the tension levels and tones and for setting her stories in all sorts of exotic spots. She even had multiple lead detectives, although she tended to return most often to two of them, the fastidious Belgian detective Hercule Poirot and the elderly spinster puzzle-solver Miss Jane Marple.

Benoit Blanc is Johnson’s version of Poirot. He first appeared in Knives Out, which was a clever modern variation of the locked-room mysteries, in which a large, dysfunctional family gathered at a large, spooky mansion and had to figure out who was responsible for the death of the patriarch of the family.

Glass Onion was slicker, a more stylized variation on the And Then There Were None narrative – a diverse group of people were stuck on a huge island home together with no way to get off, when suddenly people start dying. Of course, Johnson dragged that story even more into the present, with tech-quadrant characters and modern architecture and props.

Wake Up Dead Man is the darkest of the series to date. It is also much more serious – the comic sections are limited and muted – and it is in certain ways the most old-fashioned of the films. It is thoughtful about subjects like faith and religion, ostracism, politics, obsession, greed and small-town life.

It is the most remotely filmed of the group – most of the action takes place in a rundown but still grand church and the land surrounding it. The church is supposed to be in New York state, but the movie was filmed in England, and it definitely has much more of a British energy than an American one.

Even Benoit Blanc in the end sort of cedes his authority as the voice of justice and allows the local priest played by Josh O’Connor to become the moral fulcrum, and to unmask the killer.

The good thing is, no matter how many pathways this series goes down, it continues to work. Wake Up Dead Man is not quite as good as Knives Out and probably a bit better than Glass Onion, but all the films work and work well – both in concert with each other and as individual statements.

Wake Up Dead Man is the second film in the series which Johnson has made for Netflix, which fulfills a two-sequel distribution deal. The streaming service has said in the past they would be willing to keep releasing these films as long as Johnson was making them. If the Netflix contract does end up expiring, don’t be surprised if Johnson and his favorite detective keep coming back through a different venue as long as the series is viable. 

After all, Johnson has quite a long way to go to catch up with and match Christie’s body of work. “That's true. I'm slacking,” he said. So don’t be at all surprised to see an entirely new variation of the mystery from this crew in a couple of years.

Jay S. Jacobs

Copyright ©2025 PopEntertainment.com. All rights reserved. Posted: November 24, 2025.