Rian Johnson Teases a Return to Roots: ‘Wake Up Dead Man’ Embraces Classic Murder Mystery Vibes Over Predecessors’ Flair
LOS ANGELES — As the red carpets roll out for the limited theatrical release of Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, director Rian Johnson is pulling back the curtain on what makes this third installment in his whip-smart whodunit series feel like a loving nod to the golden age of detective fiction. In a candid interview with Town & Country ahead of the film’s debut today, Johnson revealed that the movie dials back the extravagant, genre-bending spectacle of its predecessors to plunge deeper into the locked-room puzzles and moral intricacies that defined early 20th-century masters like Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr.
“I had gotten really into this classic mystery novelist, John Dickson Carr, who specialized in locked-door mysteries,” Johnson shared, his enthusiasm palpable as he described the blueprint for Benoit Blanc’s latest brain-teaser. Unlike the opulent family estate intrigue of 2019’s Knives Out—a mahogany-paneled riff on Christie’s country house killings—or the sun-soaked, celebrity-fueled escapades of 2022’s Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, which echoed the glossy Hollywood satire of The Last of Sheila, Wake Up Dead Man opts for a more restrained, atmospheric approach. “This one goes down the more classic murder mystery route,” Johnson explained, emphasizing a structure built on impossible crimes and airtight alibis rather than over-the-top set pieces.
The result? A taut, Gothic-flavored tale set in the fictional upstate New York parish of Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude, where a fire-and-brimstone monsignor (Josh Brolin) meets a grisly end during a Good Friday service—an “impossible miracle crime,” as Johnson puts it, that has the congregation whispering of divine intervention or devilish deceit. Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc, the drawling Southern sleuth with a penchant for Poirot-esque theatrics, arrives not in a yacht or amid tech moguls, but in a sleepy rural town gripped by faith-fueled fervor. “It’s his most dangerous case yet,” teases the official logline, and early reviews bear that out, praising the film’s shift to “charged moral tension” and a “darker tone” laced with horror flourishes.
This pivot isn’t just stylistic; it’s deeply personal for Johnson, who grew up in an evangelical household and infuses the script with reflections on faith’s double-edged sword. “I grew up very Christian and I’m not anymore,” he told Town & Country. “It’s something that I’ve got a lot of deep feelings about. It was really the connection of setting a mystery in a church and having it be about faith.” The story centers on a young priest, Father Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor, fresh off Challengers), reassigned to assist the radicalizing Monsignor Wicks after a scandal at his previous parish. When the elder cleric is slain in a scenario that defies logic—complete with a locked chapel door and no visible weapon—suspicions fall on Jud, whose own violent history bubbles to the surface. Blanc, teamed with local sheriff Geraldine Scott (Mila Kunis), must navigate a rogues’ gallery of suspects: a devout church matron (Glenn Close), a conspiracy-peddling novelist (Andrew Scott), a satirical political influencer (Daryl McCormack), a gullible small-town doctor (Jeremy Renner), and more.
Critics who’ve caught early screenings at the Toronto International Film Festival are already hailing it as Johnson’s sharpest puzzle yet. The Independent calls it a “cool, clever whodunnit” that lists literary touchstones like Carr’s The Hollow Man and Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd right in the script, while Moviejawn dubs it an “American-Gothic-murder-buddy-comedy” elevated by Craig and O’Connor’s crackling chemistry. Even as it grapples with thorny 2025 issues—like the exploitation of religion to stoke fear and division—Wake Up Dead Man retains the series’ irreverent humor and twisty denouements, extending its finale into a “poignant examination of what it means to be truly righteous,” per DNyuz.
Johnson’s commitment to evolution keeps the franchise fresh without alienating fans. “Each installment has its own distinct flavor,” notes an IMDb reviewer who snagged a pre-release peek, adding that the church setting “forces you to wrestle with the shifting boundary between ‘good’ and ‘evil.'” And with Netflix dropping the film streaming-side on December 12, the timing couldn’t be better for holiday-season sleuthing.
As buzz builds, Johnson and Craig are already “starting to formulate” ideas for Knives Out 4 and 5, per a Bleeding Cool report—hinting that Blanc’s deductive adventures are far from over. For now, though, Johnson seems content letting Wake Up Dead Man stand as a testament to the enduring allure of the classic form. “It would be much harder” to make simple movies, he admitted to Polygon, underscoring why this series refuses to play it safe. In a landscape of reboots and franchises gone stale, Johnson’s got the formula just right: a killer plot, suspects to die for, and a detective who’s always one step ahead. Cue the southern drawl—Benoit Blanc is back, and the clues are divine.
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