SPOILER ALERT: This story discusses major plot developments, including the ending, in “Wake Up Dead Man,” currently streaming on Netflix.
About midway through “Wake Up Dead Man,” the buzz of activity and intrigue around the murder of a small-town priest slows down — way down.
At first, it seems like an inconvenience. Rev. Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor), the prime suspect in the murder of his former colleague Msgr. Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin), is trying to suss out information from a small-town construction company clerk. Someone had ordered construction be done on the mausoleum in which Wicks would eventually be interred; finding out who’d made the call might move the investigation forward, and bring Jud closer to clearing his own name. The clerk (Bridget Everett), over the phone, pauses and asks Jud to pray for her.
Her name is Louise, and she’s concerned that she will have ended her relationship with her mother on bad terms. Mom has a brain tumor which is affecting her personality, and Louise said unkind things the last time that they spoke — out of pain and misplaced grief and, we suspect even as Louise does not say, fear. Jud seems, suddenly, at ease. He’s hardly pleased to be ministering to a woman in crisis, but he knows the words to say. He knows the things to do. He accepts that he will not be getting the information he needs in the moment, and instead tells Louise that, however she may feel, she is not alone. He leads her in prayer. It’s a small relief for Louise, and for Jud: And, for the first time in this surprisingly profound meditation on faith and alienation, he is able to actually do his job.
Each film in the “Knives Out” franchise, of which this is the third installment, has spotlit one character as a sort of exemplar. In “Knives Out” proper, Ana de Armas’ Marta is so unremittingly honest that she literally cannot stomach a lie; in “Glass Onion,” Janelle Monáe plays a double role, one twin sister, Andi, a thwarted and cheated genius and the other, Helen, a low-key but determined avenging angel. Here, though, O’Connor’s Jud is fully at the center of the frame, intriguingly pushing detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) to the story’s margins. And his small-scale moment of grace illuminates the contours of writer-director Rian Johnson’s most complicated and enigmatic mystery yet.
Jud emerges as a character gradually. We first meet him as he’s exiled to the small-town parish of Chimney Rock, N.Y., a punishment after he assaults a fellow man of the cloth. That flash of impulse, that capacity for quick-flaring violence, makes for a deceptive introduction, though: We’re told, later, that as a young boxer, Jud killed a man in the ring, and we’re shown, through O’Connor’s glimmeringly alive performance, that he works every day to earn redemption. This is the work he thought he’d be doing every day as a priest. But assigned to assist Wicks, a demagogue whose politically-charged sermons are designed to alienate all but the loyalists he soaks for money and for attention, Jud feels further from his purpose. One might say he feels further, too, from God’s light. Wicks’ death is a crisis for Jud. He knows he didn’t do it. But because he felt some measure of gratitude that it happened… Well, isn’t that just as bad?
Johnson has, throughout his career, been deeply engaged by the question of what it means to be good and do good; the venal amorality of a wealthy family of ne’er-do-wells, in the first “Knives Out,” and a friend group of archcapitalist socialites, in “Glass Onion,” place Marta and Helen’s rectitude into sharper relief. Setting a “Knives Out” story in a literal church community might seem to push the point farther than it need go: We get it, Rian.
The mastery of this movie, if not the best of the franchise (it feels that way right now, but time shall tell), then certainly the one that most effectively shifts between tones, is in what the Catholics refer to as “the mystery of faith.” Unlike the squabbling family members or avaricious frenemies of the first two films, Jud’s fellow-suspects in this go-around aren’t, per se, bad people. They have, though, been badly misled. And that means there is a chance for them to be brought back to the path. Unfortunately, Jud scarcely has time to do it, what with needing to help solve a crime and all. But shining through this installment of what can be a caustically cynical franchise is a belief not in inherent human goodness but in the potential to overcome our lesser impulses. Jud wakes up most days — one bad day, at the start of the film, aside — and manages to keep his fists down.
O’Connor illuminates this for us in a performance that builds greatness out of endless small moments: Tamped-down frustration at his treatment by Wicks, an overeagerness to connect with parishioners who don’t care about his message of love and unity. And, crucially, a willingness to stop his investigation — and the movie that investigation centers around — dead in its tracks, in order to try and help someone. Later in the film, when Everett’s character calls Jud on the phone to share who it was who ordered the construction, a major plot development feels surprisingly inconsequential as the tone of her voice comes through. She sounds lighter, at ease, as if some small measure of trouble had been taken off of her mind. (Credit to Everett, who, in a movie of consistently though not universally strong performances, stands out for giving a performance of only a few minutes’ duration.) The Louise phone call scene starts to feel like the photo negative of the eerie and off-putting Mike Yanagita scene in “Fargo”: An off-topic aside that opens up the movie’s themes and its story.
At the film’s conclusion, as Glenn Close’s barnburning final confession makes clear what many attentive viewers will have kind of suspected — that she masterminded the whole thing. But a certain fundamental open-heartedness leavens the proceedings. You hire Glenn Close to play a church lady who plots a murder so that she can Glenn Close it up, and there is true pleasure in watching this latest in her late-career chances to cut loose, to let fly her motives and her resentments. (Her tainted saintliness here would make “Wake Up Dead Man” an ideal double-feature with her Satanic turn in 2024’s “The Deliverance.”)
But something keeps the moment from becoming so big that it subsumes the movie. And that’s Jud’s patience and care. He wants her confession not merely — maybe not at all — so that he’s cleared of the crime. He wants it because he wants her soul to be easy, because she is a human being struggling with guilt and because, after months at this parish, he sees the ways in which the parish’s history of pitting the faithful against one another set her up to fail from her earliest days. There’s always a chance for redemption, even at the end. We know he believes this, because we saw him try to redeem Louise’s relationship with her mother in its final days — and because he felt that good deed would redeem Jud himself, as he presumed his life as a free man was ending. That the case is cracked seems to Jud simply not to matter. He has bigger things on his mind.
And as a character study and as a story of what it might take — not necessarily religious faith, but a belief in a project bigger than one’s own immediate interests — so does “Wake Up Dead Man.” That eye on something larger takes it from earthbound sleuth story to something that, in its best moments, edges up to the divine.
