Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery Parent Guide

After punching an insufferable deacon, Reverend Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor) is reassigned to a rural church, promisingly called Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude. The church is headed by the domineering and irate Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin), and Jud believes the congregation needs to hear a less hostile and more compassionate version of Catholicism – putting him on a violent collision course with the Monsignor. So, when the Monsignor drops dead with a knife in his back during Easter Sunday mass, the congregants are quick to point the finger at Jud. The only catch is, as far as the police can tell, there’s no possible way for anybody to have murdered Wicks in the first place. Dumbfounded, but still very suspicious of the junior priest, the police bring in private detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), who starts working with Jud to get to the bottom of this bloody mess.

Much like the Agatha Christie stories which inspired it, just about everybody in this tale has some possible motive for committing the murder, and they make for a wild parade of the desperate, the disreputable, and the disturbed. There’s intrigue and drama under every stone overturned by Benoit Blanc; little loose story ends squirming like worms in the mud. The film has approximately a thousand red herrings, but astute genre fans (not to pat myself on the back) will probably have a pretty good idea who did it, even if the how never quite lines up. I can’t entirely blame the film for that – sneaky endings are endemic in Agatha Christie stories, too.

My biggest beef with Wake Up Dead Man is pacing: The movie is twenty minutes too long at least, and I think most of that bloat is due to all those red herrings. There’s such a thing as too much misdirection. The unbelievably star-studded cast carries the movie along, and the writing is quite funny as well, but there’s still plenty that probably should have stayed on the editing room floor.

Genre fans will probably enjoy the production, but I don’t think this is a great choice for younger viewers. There’s plenty of gruesome violence, a good deal of cussing, and an ongoing joke regarding unlikely masturbation stories in confessional. It’s also, again, rather too long, and younger viewers may get lost in the weeds on the periphery of the story.

I haven’t seen either of the preceding films, but that wasn’t much of a barrier to entry. The film is a standalone story, with Blanc as the only connective tissue tying it to the previous entries. It’s also a fun little mystery, laden with twists, murders, miracles, and of course, Daniel Craig’s delightfully over-the-top, nearly Foghorn Leghorn southern accent. I could watch that almost indefinitely.

About author

Keith Hawkes

Keith Hawkes graduated from Mount Royal University, Calgary, Canada with a degree in English and History. His interests are movies, American literature, science fiction, almost every kind of music, and museums. He enjoys criticizing films for fun - although he's okay with being paid for it.