“Wake Up Dead Man”: A Murder Mystery with God in the Details

They’re a pretty wretched lot. There’s a local doctor, Nat Sharp (Jeremy Renner), who has slipped into alcoholic despair since his wife left him, and Lee Ross (Andrew Scott), a best-selling author and self-professed recovering liberal, whose rightward drift has led him to write an unreadable book about Wicks’s life. Somewhat more sympathetic are Simone Vivane (Cailee Spaeny), a gifted cellist, sidelined by chronic pain, whose generous donations keep the church running, and Vera Draven (Kerry Washington), a high-strung attorney. The script’s most cynical creation is Vera’s adoptive son, Cy (Daryl McCormack), a soulless opportunist who, after failing to launch himself into Republican politics, is now aiming for social-media stardom. Wicks’s most devoted ally is Our Lady’s designated church lady, Martha Delacroix (an amusing Glenn Close), who knows where the proverbial bodies are buried. (Speaking of which: just outside the church is an enormous crypt that underscores the film’s Lazarusian title.)

Into this group comes an earnest ray of light: Father Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor), a junior priest—“young, dumb, and full of Christ,” in his own words—who has been sent to serve in Wicks’s church. Overflowing with grace and mercy, Jud yearns to embrace his parishioners in their human brokenness, without condemnation. Naturally, the monsignor immediately sees him as a threat and launches a vicious campaign of psychological warfare, repeatedly forcing Jud to hear his confessions—in which Wicks describes his masturbation habits in nauseating detail—and undercutting the younger priest’s authority at every opportunity. Jud, a former boxer with a checkered history, has vowed never (again) to throw a fist in anger, but Wicks’s bullying tactics tempt him to break it. They also make Jud the prime suspect when the monsignor is fatally stabbed in church, right after delivering his Good Friday homily, in an alcove located just out of the congregation’s view. Before long, Blanc arrives on the scene, bent on figuring out how Wicks could have been slain, mid-service, by a murderer who appears to have passed right through the church’s walls. Regrettably, no one terms the incident a Mass murder.

When the first “Knives Out” was released in theatres, in 2019, it felt like a Hollywood revival—and a sophisticated rewiring—of a lost narrative art. Here was an original country-house murder plot, constructed with enormous care and rigorous ingenuity. Johnson sharpened these throwback pleasures by pairing them with razor-sharp progressive politics: the film was a kind of Cinderella story, in which a kind, lowly heroine (Ana de Armas) teamed up with Blanc to solve the crime and ended up triumphing over her racist, classist, obscenely wealthy former employers. Johnson preserved the story’s structure in his next “Knives Out” mystery, “Glass Onion” (2022), again pairing Blanc with an upstanding foil (Janelle Monáe) and launching, this time, an attack on billionaires and tech bros everywhere. Even so, the joke was at least partly on the movie: by then, the growing “Knives Out” franchise had been acquired by Netflix, a move that put Johnson’s disruptor-culture satire in a rather different light. Like most Netflix films, “Glass Onion” received only a token theatrical release and never got the chance to become a major big-screen hit on the order of the first “Knives Out,” which grossed more than three hundred million dollars worldwide. (If the laughter hasn’t died in your throat yet, Netflix now seems poised to acquire Warner Bros., throwing the direction of one of the last major Hollywood studios and its future theatrical releases into doubt.)

“Wake Up Dead Man,” which arrives on Netflix this week, directs its political ire at the unholy alliance of Christianity and the political right; the intolerance, insularity, and rampant misogyny that have taken root in the church; and the terrifying speed with which the disgruntled clergymen of today can become the YouTube demagogues of tomorrow. In dropping this satirical payload, the movie does bear out a structural weakness in the “Knives Out” series: a nagging shortage of individual development among the supporting characters. With one or two exceptions, Wicks’s parishioners feel little more than decorative; there’s no real sense of suspicion mounting and falling on each one of them in turn. Most are snide and strident, petty and self-serving, and their bickersome denunciations turn monotonous in ways that suggest, at times, a less-than-generous deity in the director’s chair.