Director Rian Johnson has always treated genre as a set of tools rather than a destination. With Wake Up Dead Man, the third film in his Knives Out series, those tools are still sharp — the clockwork plotting, the sprawling ensemble and Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc orbiting the mess like a curious moon — but the engine driving them is unusually personal. This time, Johnson isn’t dismantling wealth or celebrity. He’s turning the mystery inward, toward the faith he grew up with and never fully escaped.
Set in a snowbound parish in rural upstate New York, Wake Up Dead Man trades sunlit excess for cold interiors and moral claustrophobia. Blanc arrives to investigate a death inside a Catholic church where belief functions less as comfort than as pressure. At the center of the story is the Rev. Jud Duplenticy, played by Josh O’Connor, a former boxer turned priest whose sincerity puts him at odds with both his superiors and the town’s suspicion. The film is careful not to tip its hand too early about where Jud stands or what the church represents. That ambiguity is the point.
Johnson said the film began with an impulse he hadn’t followed before: letting his own faith history shape a story rather than sit quietly behind it. He grew up in a Christian home, deeply embedded in church life well into early adulthood.
“I grew up very, very Christian,” Johnson said. “Through my childhood, teenage years into my early twenties, it wasn’t just that I was in a churchy household. My relationship with Christ was really how I framed the world around me.”
He no longer considers himself a believer, but that distance hasn’t produced clean lines or easy conclusions. Instead, it left him with unresolved tension that felt increasingly relevant outside the church. Johnson described feeling worn down by the ambient hostility of the present moment — the sense that everything, especially online, is framed as conflict. The language of “us versus them,” he noted, isn’t confined to religious spaces.
What surprised him was where he found relief from that posture. Rather than rejecting his religious past outright, he felt himself circling back to the parts of Christianity that once shaped him — particularly teachings about loving enemies and resisting grievance. Not as doctrine, but as instinct.
“As anyone who was a believer at some point in their life tells you, it never goes away,” he said. “It’s always there in some form.”
That lingering presence is what Wake Up Dead Man explores, without trying to resolve it. Johnson was clear that he didn’t set out to make a faith film or a critique of one. He wanted to stage a conversation that could hold generosity and harm at the same time. That balance shows up in how the film depicts the church itself. There is real damage here, embodied in figures who weaponize belief and speak in the language of siege. Johnson doesn’t avoid that. But he also refuses to flatten faith into “church trauma” alone.
The negative experiences, he said, were real. So were the positive ones. And they weren’t separable.
“It wasn’t like there were two separate camps,” Johnson said. “It was much more like two clouds intermingling.”
That intermingling shaped the hardest character for him to write. Reverend Jud initially felt false on the page — filtered through Johnson’s present-day skepticism. The breakthrough came when Johnson realized he had to write Jud not through his lens of faith now, but through the eyes of his youth group days. He described the process like method acting, returning mentally to his believing self and letting that perspective guide the character.
“That’s a heavy trip,” Johnson said. “You don’t go through that journey and come out the other end unchanged.”
To be clear, Jud isn’t an avatar for Johnson’s current views, nor is he a rebuttal to them. He believes deeply even when belief costs him. That sincerity complicates Blanc’s role in the story. Though Blanc is famously skeptical, Johnson leaned into the detective’s discomfort with the church setting. Early drafts softened Blanc’s antagonism. Daniel Craig pushed back.
Craig argued that Blanc should arrive more openly hostile, more visibly triggered by the space itself. Johnson resisted, then reconsidered. The relationship only works if the tension is real.
“These two are about to go on a journey together,” Johnson said. “By the end of the movie, even though they’re still on opposite sides of that fence, they’ve formed a civil relationship of mutual respect.”
That word matters. Johnson isn’t interested in reconciliation narratives that erase difference. Blanc doesn’t convert. Jud doesn’t deconstruct. What they build instead is something rarer: a relationship that survives disagreement.
“The bigger that divide is at the start,” Johnson said, “the more potent that model is.”
If Wake Up Dead Man feels quieter than its predecessors, it’s because Johnson is less interested in skewering a target than observing how people coexist inside unresolved belief systems. The mystery unfolds carefully, revealing histories and motives without turning faith into a gimmick. Even the film’s final movements resist neat moral closure. Answers arrive, but certainty does not.
Johnson is cautious about framing any of this as a message. He distrusts didacticism, especially around belief. What he hopes for instead is conversation, rooted in lived experience rather than ideology.
“My hope is that people will have a conversation about faith coming out of it,” he said. “Not that they learn a lesson, but that they come out talking with the people around them about their experience.”
That instinct feels timely. Johnson didn’t plan the film around a cultural wave, but he’s aware that faith has returned to the center of American conversation, often awkwardly and contentiously. Hollywood tends to avoid the subject unless it’s safely compartmentalized. Wake Up Dead Man refuses that safety. It treats faith as something nearly everyone has brushed against, whether they stayed, left or never believed.
“Everybody has a personal perspective on it,” Johnson said. “And I find people want to talk.”
That desire to talk — not to win, convert or burn it down — is what animates Wake Up Dead Man. Beneath the mechanics of the mystery is a quieter question: What do we do with the parts of ourselves we thought we’d outgrown? Johnson doesn’t answer it. He just builds a room where the question can sit, unresolved, and invites us inside.
Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery is playing now on Netflix.
