Film & TV

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery

BFI LFF 2025 Opening Night Gala: Can the sequel match its original hype?

David Latimer

17 Oct 2025 — 3 min read

The first screening of the festival (and probably chosen due to its star appeal) was Wake Up Dead Man: the latest in Rian Johnson’s Benoit Blanc detective thrillers. Daniel Craig returns as Benoit Blanc, infamous private detective, to don another tweed suit to accompany his new beard and grown-out hair. He journeys to a rural town’s chapel in rural New York state to find a miracle murder he is unable to comprehend. Alongside him is the man believed to have committed it – a new priest, Jud (Josh O’Connor), riddled with guilt over his pre-ecclesiastical life. As the third in the series, Rian has a lot to prove. The original, Knives Out, was a ubiquitously loved classic but Glass Onion, the mid-pandemic follow-up, was met with some more apprehensive reviews. Has Rian been able to return to what people loved about the original?

Many criticisms of Glass Onion were rooted in disappointment that the mystery of that film is far more straightforward than the twisting labyrinth of its predecessor. While that was the point of the movie (the title itself even alluding to a banal answer to a seemingly layered question), the plot of the first film was one of the greatest things about it. In Wake Up Dead Man, it’s clear that Rian has taken the hint. Once established, the mystery is immediately presented as an impossible scenario which, over the next two hours, takes the viewer with it as it winds and swerves and doesn’t let go. As time goes by, layers begin to peel off slowly as one begins to start making more sense of the whole ordeal, but the pieces never seem to fit together entirely until the very end. It feels like a return to form for the franchise and the more convoluted elements make the final reveal that much more satisfying. I would go so far to say that the “locked-room” mystery in Wake Up Dead Man is more compelling to me than Knives Out’s whodunnit. However, Knives Out succeeds in some ways better than Wake Up Dead Man.

It feels like a return to form for the franchise and the more convoluted elements make the final reveal that much more satisfying.

One trademark of Benoit Blanc’s catalogue of endeavours is the star-studded, quirky entourage surrounding the death. Making up the suspects, the ensemble cast needs to be interesting and memorable for the film to truly work. And, performance-wise, it does. The characters are well-portrayed, as one might expect from the likes of Jeremy Renner and Kerry Washington. Unfortunately, the characters do at times feel under-utilised or lacking in depth. Andrew Scott is, as always, infectious with his performance but his character still isn’t given a role in the story deserving of it. In Knives Out, the Thrombey family feels like a real family with all the overlapping feuding and implied history. In contrast, many of the characters in Wake Up Dead Man feel too disconnected from the victim and the story at large.

Despite being about Blanc, the films in the series tend to focus primarily on a member of the cast other than him. In Knives Out, we followed Marta, played wonderfully by Ana de Armas, the murder victim’s personal nurse. In this newer entry, the role is taken up by Josh O’Connor with another incredible performance. The first half an hour of the film is dedicated to his backstory and his narration of the events leading up to the murder. But despite Blanc’s absence, the intro is engaging as O’Connor immediately hooks you in. The way he portrays a soft-spoken chaplain whose performance is carried out with a palpable sense of internalised, Catholic guilt is hypnotising. This is contrasted heavily with Monsignor Wickes (Josh Brolin), Jud’s superior, whose scathing, hateful rhetoric and meteoric performance ignite countless fires in the plot.

This film filled me with the same kind of joy as Knives Out and reinvigorated my love for this series and my need for it to keep going. Like with Glass Onion, Netflix has agreed to give Wake Up Dead Man a theatrical release window. Before its 12th December release on the platform, Wake Up Dead Man will have a two-week long run at the end of November. I would seriously recommend watching this one in cinemas and I hope you’ll agree on its instant classic status.