Writer-director Rian Johnson manages to change things up yet again in his newest Benoit Blanc whodunit, Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery.

Johnson clearly knows what he’s doing with the murder-mystery genre, and he’s learned from the best of them. You know what they say: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. After taking audiences to the Thrombey estate and Miles Braun’s Glass Onion, faith enters the picture with Johnson moving the setting to a Catholic parish. But it goes without saying that getting to attend the world premieres has been a real privilege, and one that I do not take for granted. If Wake Up Dead Man is the last installment of the Benoit Blanc mysteries, it’s been a fun adventure. But if it isn’t, I can’t wait to see what direction Johnson takes the franchise next.

Much like its predecessors, Wake Up Dead Man is best experienced knowing very little going into the film. I’ll have more to say below the photo.

In the third chapter of Rian Johnson’s murder mystery series, Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) is taking on his most dangerous case to date. Young boxer-turned-priest Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor) is sent to assist Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin), but tension soon emerges in the parish. Wicks’s congregation includes loyal churchgoer Martha Delacroix (Glenn Close), groundskeeper Samson Holt (Thomas Haden Church), lawyer Vera Draven (Kerry Washington), aspiring politician Cy Draven (Daryl McCormack), doctor Nat Sharp (Jeremy Renner), sci-fi author Lee Ross (Andrew Scott), and cellist Simone Vivane (Cailee Spaeny).

When a sudden and seemingly impossible murder unsettles the town, the absence of a clear suspect forces police chief Geraldine Scott (Mila Kunis) to work with detective Benoit Blanc on a mystery that resists explanation.

After experiencing the world premieres of the first two films, the biggest question on my mind was how Rian Johnson would manage to top himself with Wake Up Dead Man. It isn’t just that he assembled another star-studded cast, but that he placed them in an impossible situation at the scene of a crime. Little by little, things happen, and then more things happen, and yet even more things over the film’s nearly two-and-a-half-hour runtime. Listen, I’ve got to be careful here, because there are things in this film that happen—and I am not going to talk about some of those things!

Between setting Wake Up Dead Man at Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude in upstate New York and Nathan Johnson’s work on the score (the man can do no wrong with this franchise), the film carries a distinctly gothic atmosphere, no doubt inspired by Edgar Allan Poe. Rather than chase the chaos of Glass Onion, Rian Johnson opts for a more grounded tone in line with Knives Out. Still, there’s room for humor in solving the locked-door mystery, including one joke that had me clapping before anyone else reacted in the theater because I could see exactly where Johnson was headed—and it paid off completely.

It isn’t just Agatha Christie and Edgar Allan Poe that Johnson draws on here. There’s also a clear influence from John Dickson Carr and G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown mysteries. Watching a murder mystery play out in a church adds another layer, with themes of guilt and morality running throughout.

Wake Up Dead Man cements the Benoit Blanc mysteries as one of the defining franchises of our time. Like Christie, Poe, or Carr before him, Johnson proves that a great detective story can transcend setting and style, speaking to timeless questions of truth and morality. Whatever the future holds, audiences will look back at this trilogy as a high-water mark for the modern whodunit.

DIRECTOR/SCREENWRITER: Rian Johnson
CAST: Daniel Craig, Josh O’Connor, Glenn Close, Josh Brolin, Mila Kunis, Jeremy Renner, Kerry Washington, Andrew Scott, Cailee Spaeny, Daryl McCormack, Thomas Haden Church

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery holds its world premiere during the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival in the Special Presentations program. Netflix will release the film in select theaters on November 26, 2025, and stream globally on December 12, 2025. Grade: 4/5

Please subscribe to Solzy on Buttondown and visit Dugout Dirt.