Father Judd (Josh O’Connor) is reassigned to a small congregation in rural, upstate New York presided over by the stern Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin). During the Good Friday service, Mons. Wicks steps aside into the vestibule and collapses dead, out of view of everyone except for the transplanted priest. Fr. Judd, with a history of violence and an ideological opposite of Wicks, is the main suspect in the case, and when news breaks that there is a large inheritance to be gained upon Wicks’ death, only Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) can solve the murder and either prove or exonerate the young priest who has already alienated himself from many of his new flock.

Rian Johnson brings Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery to Netflix, continuing his pop-mystery streak. The 144-minute caper debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival ahead of a limited awards qualifying theatrical run and its eventual bow on the streaming platform. After a Covid-era Glass Onion (2022), Wake Up Dead Man is a return to form for Johnson’s modern sleuth as he is allowed a wider breath and a whole town of suspects and locales to investigate. As the second title to spawn from what was originally conceived as a standalone mystery – in an albeit evergreen format – this accidental franchise is still very much in its awkward puberty stages, and with his contractual obligations to Netflix having been met, it will be curious to see how the fully-intentioned Johnson continues to mold this social satire series moving forward.

Continuing a streak of his own, O’Connor leads the film as the up and coming, new, young priest in a very traditional and close-knit congregation. Most of the film’s plot engine is fueled through his voiceover, but Johnson’s script strikes a pretty good balance between the framing device and actually showing us the action of the scene. Much of O’Connor’s lines are filling in the history of the situation while we see his bristling interactions with the congregation. It is a smart utilization of dialogue as it helps keep us on track without have to overindulge in flashbacks setting up the players, and when the film is forced to go back and show us a second viewpoint, the voiceover helps us to reorient ourselves to that point in the story. On top of that, the deadpan stream of consciousness which flows from Fr. Judd pairs perfectly with the wickedly funny, fish out of water affectations that O’Connor bases his physical performance on.

This return to form also means that Blanc is not always the central figure of the film, and with less on the page, O’Connor absolutely wrestles control of the film away from Craig in the larger scope. This usurpation is hardly hostile, though, and Craig revels in his glorified supporting role, injecting, admittedly, much of the same brand of humor we have come to expect from Blanc. Whereas Glass Onion showed us a little more of Blanc as a character, Wake Up Dead Man treats him simply as the outside sleuth sent in to save the day. With a large ensemble cast to sort through and make sense of, it is understandable why Johnson chose not to extend the runtime to flesh out his detective, but in doing so, he affords Craig no new material so it can almost be said that he is sleepwalking his way through this case as there is nothing for him to build upon other than sporting a new, shaggy hairstyle that would have made more sense in the coming-out-of-lockdown Glass Onion than it does here when he shows up looking meticulously disheveled.

His arrival on the town is actually one of the more underexplained areas of the plot, mentioned briefly that he was called by Chief Geraldine Scott (Mila Kunis), we begin to understand that O’Connor’s voiceover is not a letter calling him to his own rescue, but a statement given after Blanc arrives. Scott, however, already had Judd pegged dead to rights in her mind, so it is just a distracting – admittedly, unimportant – detail when Blanc arrives nearly out of the blue. It is a shame because the banter which he shares with O’Connor is quite good, and Craig is certainly a capable actor, but in this third outing Blanc feels more like a caricature than an actual character and stands out like a sore thumb in the narrative, more so than the script simply calls for. Part of the allure of these stories is an eccentric third party voice disrupting a plot, but Blanc here is failed on the page and Craig is only able to tow the line with what he is asked to do.

As with most murder mystery ensembles, the joy of these films comes in the energy brought in by the supporting cast of oddballs with a shared secret. This outing, however, finds Blanc interacting much less with the community than in prior mysteries, but that does not stop this eccentric bunch from finding their moment or two to shine. Of the bunch, it is Cy (Daryl McCormack) that seems to have the most of Johnson’s ire levied against him as the writer/director tears down the youngest member of the cast’s political (read: grifting) aspirations. Cy makes an interesting antagonistic foil to Wicks; both men seeking a public facing office to exploit for their own gain, one through religion and the other through straight politics. Johnson is careful not to allow this story to be twisted into an argument of young against the old, but rather a unified striking down of the weaponizing of public pulpits. That being said, Johnson does gear Cy to be the purposefully youngest cast member, allowing him to occupy more as a nuisance across the narrative instead of someone more actively damaging. While he is dangerous in his own way, this layer shows some narrative growth on behalf of Johnson when compared to Jacob Thrombey (Jaeden Martell), a Turning Point twerp that is simply punched down on in Knives Out (2019).

Beyond that, author Lee Ross (Andrew Scott), escaping the city to navigate this crossroads of his career that has toppled out of his hands similarly occupies a role in this plot that he has little control over. Scott does well with what he is afforded on the page, but the very nature of his screen presence, even in muted roles such as this, leaves us wanting more. Opposite him is Dr. Nat Sharp (Jeremy Renner), and while he is given a little more to do here, Renner, in his first major feature role since his near-fatal snowplow accident in early 2023, brings some of the charisma down. It is more a symptom of the tone which Johnson is going for more so than the actual performance as Johnson set this murder in a dank and sleepy town and his direction to his actors seemingly matched that tone on the page. It is all well and good, but with Renner occupying as much of the film as he does, safe for a few streaks of energy, makes it hard to settle into the film and not want to also just settle in for a nap under a chunky, wool afghan. Much of the cast is given a lot of screentime with frightfully little to actively do as much of the action is in revelations rather than coverup. The one character who does have the most agency across the narrative is Martha Delacroix (Glenn Close), the custodian of the chapel, because – beyond Close simply reveling in the buffet of scenery she gets to chew through – she creates such an interesting pair with the Monsignor Wicks. A foil in a much different way than Cy, she has similarly been one of the more established members of the congregation, and she has found her faith unwittingly poisoned; a victim to Wick’s addictive rhetoric.

Wake Up Dead Man is a strange entry not just into the Knives Out cannon, but the entire murder mystery genre at large. Johnson seems to be entering into the format of a mystery to explore not only the twisting of religion by politics, but more broadly, religion in general. Rick Heinrichs’ full production design, while giving us plenty to look at and fully realizing this world, gets in the way of Johnson’s apparent goals with the story, beckoning us to be lulled into this sleepy little town while Johnson is challenging us to see how we square up with religion in our own lives; all the while Blanc hurriedly bumbles around in search of clues. Thematically, the film is asking a lot, but it also marks a change in scripting in that Johnson, again noting some growth on the page, almost seems to have compassion on the wider part of the cast of characters. In Blanc’s first two outings, he found himself ensnared with a host of repugnant characters of their own making, and Johnson was able to work out his ire with the rot of society through them. Here, Johnson is writing about a collection of people who have been hurt and lied to by people that they trusted, and as such, the writing has less sting about it so much so that even Blanc seems stumped by it all, unable to fully trust these otherwise good people after all of the damage they have done to each other.