Review: Wake Up Dead Man (2025)

I can see what made this movie divisive.  It's much less a comedy than the previous Benoit Blanc movies (those being Knives Out and We start this movie with narration from Pastor Jud Duplenticy (O'Connor) as he tells the audience how he came to be the associate pastor at Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude under Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin).  We see the young pastor arrive and how Jefferson treats Jud - not very kindly - as well as Jud's attempt to meet and get to know the church 'clique' played by Jeremy Renner, Glenn Close, Kerry Washington, Thomas Haden Church, Andrew Scott, Cailee Spaeny, and Daryl McCormack.  We also quickly learn that this clique are, by Jefferson Wicks's design, pretty much the only attendees of the church as he chases out any new parishioners and that they, like Jefferson, view Jud as an outsider who doesn't belong.

These introductory scenes are where we first get our discrepancies in performance: O'Connor is actually quite brilliant in all of his interactions, but while some rise to his performance - notably Close and Scott - the rest fall between satisfactory and uninspired.  Writer/director Rian Johnson has generally been fairly good at casting actors to inhabit the satirical character archetypes for these movies, but the more serious timbre of this movie makes these early scenes feel misplaced, both in performance and tone.  It doesn't derail the movie in any way, but it certainly prepares the audience for something more akin to the previous films instead of what this one ultimately ends up being.

Eventually, we get to our murder (for what good is a whodunnit if there isn't a murder to be solved?) and Blanc enters the story.  The movie prevents itself as something of a locked door mystery: the character who dies does so in a room with only a single entrance, and all of our suspects are either in the pews of the church or clearly visible to those populating the pews.  One can make an educated guess - I was only partly correct with mine - on who is guilty, but the movie takes its time getting to the reveal.  In a subversion of the usual storytelling of this series, not only do we get Jud working with Blanc fairly early, but we spend most of that time watching what amounts to a character study of a young priest grappling with guilt (though, minor spoiler, not the guilt of this specific murder) and trying to hold on to a faith that has been tested and is wavering in the face of an impossible situation.

I think that switch from the formula, more than any other, plays into the reception this movie has received.  I loved it.  It helps that O'Connor gives what may be the best performance not just of this movie, but of the series - and I only hesitate in definitively saying it is the best because I want more time to sit on this film before making such a claim.  But while the previous 'assistants' to Blanc have had their own inner lives, we never saw one laid this bare for us, the audience, to see.  And as it deals with personal faith - always a touchy subject - I can very easily see it making some uncomfortable.

Now, I alluded to the inconsistency of the rest of the cast earlier, and I do want to get into the specifics of what I think went wrong, but I do want to say that only one of these performances do I consider to be a bad performance.  Most are perfectly adequate for the film, but they do not rise to the masterclass that O'Connor is giving, which makes them stand out.

First, the performances that did meet that level:  Glenn Close, Andrew Scott, and Daniel Craig.  Craig, though given less of the focus than he normally does, still finds new shades and twists to Blanc, and it never feels like this is a new person with the same name.  Close gives a devoted and rigid performance - watch the way she carries herself in various scenes and you will notice all the subtle ways she displays her character's emotions.  Scott, given far less than the other two, still feels like the most realistic of the archetypes; an almost mundane awfulness that fits the tonal shift far better than the others.

Kerry Washington and Daryl McCormack hit the archetypes well, they just don't fit into this movie.  Drop them into Knives Out or Glass Onion, and they would be great, but this movie calls for a little bit more in the performance and neither quite hits that mark.  They feel a bit too large for what this movie needs.  On the opposite end, Mila Kunis (as the local police chief) isn't playing an archetype, but almost fails to be a character entirely for lack of anything noteworthy for her to do.  She's fine, but you could grab any other half dozen actresses and their performance wouldn't deviate from hers in any way.  Kunis has proven how electric she can be onscreen - Black Swan proved that - but this script doesn't give her much to stretch those acting chops on.

Spaeny and Church both have that room to breath that Kunis was missing, but they underplay it a bit too much.  Both are closer to the 'real' performance of Scott, but don't quite punch it up enough when they need to.  Again, neither are bad, they just feel like they are missing something.

Josh Brolin as Jefferson though is the most frustrating of the performances though.  He is so good at so much of the performance:  the bullying, the mind games, the manipulations, the self righteousness - all of it is perfectly played.  It just lacks charisma.  I can see that character doing everything that he does, I just don't see how he gets a devoted clique out of it.  It's Jim Jones without the magnetism, and the performance desperately needs that missing piece.  It's constantly on the cusp of brilliant except for that.

Now, the bad performance:  Jeremy Renner.  I don't know what happened here, but it is easy to imagine he wandered onto the set, did a single take, then packed it in for the day.  The characterization is weirdly inconsistent - it's hard to point to any particular moment in the movie where two of his scenes feel like the same character.  Renner is capable of being great, but this performance isn't just phoned in - it's a partially erased message on the answering machine.  Bridget Everett - as a two-scene, mostly vocal performance - does more in her 5 minutes of screentime than Renner does with an embarrassment of opportunities.  A totally misjudged performance.

Outside of the performances, this movie continues the franchise's streak of great production design.  The church and rectory both feel very real, and we spend a large amount of time in them without them ever feeling fake.  Not only that, but the levels of both are used incredibly well to keep the movie dynamic in what would read as a static setting.

So, even as I write this, I see how I go back and forth between praise and criticism, between joy and exasperation: this movie is contradictory, but in the best way.  I will not judge anyone who doesn't enjoy it, but the various faults of this movie only serve to make the bright spots shine even brighter.

8 out of 10