No mystery is too difficult to solve for detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig). We’ve seen him get to the center of the donut hole in Knives Out and peel back the layers of the onion in Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery. But Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, Rian Johnson’s latest and darkest installment, isn’t just a murder mystery — it’s also a crisis of faith for an honest priest, as Blanc works to figure out who killed controversial clergyman Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin).
“In Wake Up Dead Man, it’s very much about Josh O’Connor’s Father Jud character, and him wanting to be a good priest, and how he achieves that or doesn’t at the end,” says Johnson.
Father Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor) is caught in the crosshairs of this whodunnit as a boxer who’s found solace in the priesthood. At the start of the story, his superiors send him to Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude, a parish in upstate New York that’s scrambling to maintain its flock. Jud arrives in good faith, hoping to help the congregants feel closer to God — an alternative to Monsignor Wicks’s spiteful sermons and false promises. “He believes in a loving God, a God that sees your faults and chooses to love them,” says O’Connor. “That never really wavers for Jud.”
But Wicks has no intention of relinquishing his ironclad grip on his followers, including devout church lady Martha Delacroix (Glenn Close), wary groundskeeper Samson Holt (Thomas Haden Church), tightly wound lawyer Vera Draven (Kerry Washington), aspiring politician Cy Draven (Daryl McCormack), local doctor Nat Sharp (Jeremy Renner), reclusive author Lee Ross (Andrew Scott), and concert cellist Simone Vivane (Cailee Spaeny).
Everything changes on Good Friday. Wicks gives a rousing sermon and takes a respite in a closet adjacent to his pulpit, like he always does. Then he collapses, dead! Jud runs to check on him and finds blood. It’s an impossible murder, a locked-room case that local police chief Geraldine Scott (Mila Kunis) can only think of one man to get to the bottom of: Blanc.
Is Jud behind Monsignor Wicks’s death? And if not, who is? And how did they do it? Below, we unpack all the mysteries that lead up to the Wake Up Dead Man ending with Johnson and the cast. “The reason I love movies is because I love endings. To me, the ending is everything,” says Johnson.
Understanding the Wicks family’s past is key to understanding this unholiest of murders. Let’s rewind the clock: The unfairly named “Harlot Whore” is Wicks’s mother, Grace (Annie Hamilton). She’s the unwed daughter of Prentice (James Faulkner), the monsignor of the church when Martha was a girl. Grace became pregnant by an unknown drifter as a teenager. Prentice had a vast family fortune, and he promised to will it to her if Grace stayed home and did as she was told. Prentice told Martha, ever his acolyte, that “wealth and the power that comes with it is Eve’s apple.”
After Prentice dies, Grace learns that there was no fortune. She has no way out. She discovers her father spent his fortune on a diamond, but it’s not in its proper box. Desperate to retrieve “Eve’s Apple,” she searches the church, tearing everything apart, including the church’s central cross, to seek a way out.
Young Martha watches her search. She tells Grace, “I know where he hid it, and you’ll never find it.” Grace tries to beat the information out of her as Martha gleefully laughs until the police drag Grace away. Devastated, she throws herself against Prentice’s tomb and dies of an aneurysm.
The darkness of the “Harlot Whore” story is the bedrock of Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude.
Nat technically kills Wicks, but the murder was the brainchild of Martha, who became displeased with the monsignor. “She comes up with this plan inspired by a mystery novel that she read to not only stop him from getting the jewel, but to steal it so that she can destroy it or throw the ring back into the fires of Mount Doom [like in The Lord of the Rings],” says Johnson. “She’s going to have to regrettably kill Wicks during the course of this. But she can kill him in such a way where he’s then venerated as a miraculous saint by the world. She thinks she can kind of have her cake and eat it too.”
The first part of her plan succeeded, and here’s how she and Dr. Nat pulled it off: After an impassioned (and, in Jud’s recollection, unhinged) homily at his Good Friday service, Wicks goes into that closet on the side of the church’s stage for a breather. But he also secretly drinks from his flask (stashed in the breaker box), which Martha had laced with a powerful tranquilizer from Nat’s medical supplies. Wicks collapses. Affixed to his red vestments is a wolf’s head painted red (to match Wicks’s robes — and to look like a devil), which is filled with a small squib of blood triggered by a radio frequency remote. Nat sets it off at the right moment, and when Jud rushes into the closet, he finds what he thinks is Wicks’s blood when he approaches the body. But Wicks isn’t dead — at least, not yet.
Taking advantage of his profession, Nat tells Jud not to touch the wolf’s head and comes into the storage closet. Martha screams, mainly as a distraction to prevent anyone from guessing she was the killer. But “she could easily scream for what she just did,” says Close. “She’d known him her whole life. It was a horrible thing that he was dead.” Nonetheless, during her wail, Nat removes the wolf’s head Martha had put on Wicks’s vestments and stabs Wicks for real, using a knife with an identical second wolf’s head on the top — a holy murder mystery indeed.
Now, why would someone as devout as Martha want to kill a priest she has known for decades? Well, she learned some damning revelations leading up to Wicks’s death.
Monsignor Wicks is Cy Draven’s dad, which shocks Wicks’s devoted followers — including Martha. For years, the town thought Cy was the illegitimate son of Vera’s (now late) father, as he brought Cy home 20 years ago when he was 10 years old. Vera’s father was Wicks’s drinking buddy and a loyal congregant, and he tasked her, a law student at the time, to raise him.
At the beginning of Holy Week, Vera calls a meeting with Wicks and his flock to reveal the truth of Cy’s parentage. As Wicks was legally her client, her colleague in Brooklyn sent her an Acknowledgment of Parentage form that Wicks had signed, affirming that he’s Cy’s biological father. Wicks dismisses Cy’s mother as a one-night stand.
Vera is shocked to learn the truth many years later and empathizes with the story of the “Harlot Whore,” who was also stuck in a position that the church’s boys’ club chose for her. Vera calls Wicks shameless for sitting in his pulpit while she raised his son. Martha’s suspicions about Wicks’s ill intent are raised when she sees the priest embracing a “terrible boy” like Cy.
Martha’s concerns are quickly confirmed. Wicks informs Cy that he had just learned of his family fortune that week (after Martha takes Jud’s challenge to heart and confesses her deepest secret, the location of the jewel, to Monsignor Wicks). After finding out about Eve’s Apple, he was ready to retire and leave behind his “sad flock of losers,” as he puts it.
“The whole thing is motivated by the jewel and who will end up with the jewel,” says Brolin. “The jewel ends up creating all the havoc that we all go through that results in somebody’s death.”
But Cy has bigger aspirations: to turn Wicks into an internet televangelist/influencer. But to do that, Wicks has to torch his loyal followers, who could be a liability, on his way out. So Wicks skewers each of them in Vera’s ad hoc meeting. Martha is horrified to realize the man she put her faith in never deserved her loyalty.
Wicks also ordered burial equipment to break into his family crypt and take the Eve’s Apple jewel from his father’s grave, as it was buried with him. Once Martha learns that Wicks placed the order, she feels it’s her responsibility to protect her sanctuary from a wicked man. “She has no life except the church,” says Close. “What motivates her is preserving the church, and keeping the jewel, the fortune, out of the hands of the man who she thinks will destroy the church,” says Close.
Johnson reminds us that Martha’s morals were shaped by Wicks’s grandfather, who buried the jewel with him rather than allowing those around him to succumb to greed. “That’s the temptation that leads to the fall, and nothing good will come of that,” says Johnson.
No, Wicks does not “rise again,” despite how many times Martha says it aloud.
After refusing to continue helping Blanc with the case, reaffirming his sense of purpose as a priest, Jud deliriously sees the Lazarus door to the Wicks family crypt open. He can barely believe what he’s seeing, as it looks like Wicks has risen again and is walking out the door.
But it’s Samson dressed in similar vestments. He’d been lying for days in the coffin he’d built for Wicks and only broke out once he’d received Nat’s text that it was time for him to “wake up” from being a “dead man.” He had not really known what he was signing up for but loved “his angel” Martha and would do anything she asked of him.
As the groundskeeper, Samson had a motion-triggered camera above his garage. Martha’s plan was for Samson, as the Wicks look-alike, to be captured on camera and for people to believe that he had “ascended to heaven,” keeping the church’s good name intact. But Jud was never supposed to be there.
Nat stabs Samson with a scythe.
But here’s how we got there: Samson pushes open the Lazarus door and goes to Nat. As they convene in the woods near the crypt, Jud comes up to them, and Samson knocks him unconscious.
The plan was for Nat to store Wicks’s body in his basement tub of poisonous green gook. Samson would say he saw Wicks rise again and ascend into heaven.
Instead, Nat was unable to resist the $80 million Eve’s Apple jewel and killed Samson to take it for himself, framing the unconscious Jud by leaving the scythe in his hand. “Martha does everything right,” says Johnson. Her one big mistake was underestimating the pull of the jewel, of the basic sin of avarice and wanting power, on Dr. Nat. “It’s an insidious thing in every element of society. It’s the root of all evil,” Johnson adds.
Martha sought vengeance. Remember when Blanc and Jud discovered Nat’s bones at the bottom of his bathtub in the basement, once Blanc drained it of its green gook? And when they also found Wicks’s dead body there, staged, leaning over the bathtub? Blanc knew Martha was the culprit then. Craig says that Blanc “has his suspicions and always has from the beginning” that Martha was the killer. “But as he says, he’s all about the facts, and until he has the evidence, he’s not going to jump to conclusions.”
Here’s how Martha tells it: She went to Nat’s place to confirm he’d strayed from the plan. He says everything was accomplished, and Martha’s suspicions are confirmed. The only thing standing between Nat and the jewel was Martha.
Nat makes them coffee, lacing Martha’s cup with a lethal dose of pentobarbital. (It leaves your lips numb, it’s painless, and you die within 10 minutes.) With hate in her heart, Martha switches the coffee cups when Nat isn’t looking. When he succumbs, she places him in the bath, where Blanc and Jud found him.
Blanc revels in making checkmate speeches after solving a mystery, but not in Wake Up Dead Man. Standing in the church’s pulpit in front of Wicks’s flock, Blanc sees Martha looking at him with numb lips: It dawns on him that she has poisoned herself with her own lethal dosage of Nat’s pentobarbital. As a warm light shines on the man incapable of not solving a crime, he experiences his own holy revelation, like Paul on his road to Damascus.
He realizes that he shouldn’t be the one to reveal the culprit. Instead, he shows grace for “my enemy, the broken, those who deserve it the least but who need it the most — for the guilty,” all in the spirit of what he’s learned from the true blessedness of Jud’s work as a priest. “Some things are bigger than the individual’s needs and wants, and he discovers that through Jud,” says Craig. “His mind is expanded. It’s an exhilarating, thrilling feeling, and we all should try and do that occasionally.”
Blanc’s journey in Wake Up Dead Man, through his relationship with Father Jud, is about getting to a place where he has empathy for another human being. “I don’t think it’s about him having any kind of spiritual revelation with the universe,” says Johnson. “It’s about realizing that having empathy for someone who least deserves it is worth sacrificing the thing that he values most and is the purpose of his life, which is this checkmate moment of solving the crime.”
Johnson affirms that Blanc ends the film just as he starts it: not a believer. But “the fact that Blanc is willing to give the checkmate moment up in order to give a fellow human being a moment of grace in their most vulnerable and guilty moment is the most Christ-like thing that’s done in the entire film, I think.”
When Police Chief Scott tells the flock to leave, Blanc allows Martha to come forward of her own free will and confess her sins. Martha lays herself bare to Father Jud, who receives her with love and compassion. “To me, that’s the heart of the movie,” says Johnson. “At the beginning of the movie, we almost give him a Disney princess ‘I want’ song when he’s in front of that little makeshift tribunal of the three priests. He says, ‘All I want is to be a good priest and to bring forgiveness to the broken people in the world.’” Martha’s last rites scene is the culmination of that wish.
Martha confesses to Jud that she watched Prentice take his last communion, swallowing the Eve’s Apple jewel. With his cursed fortune put to rest, she didn’t reveal the location of the jewel for 60 years (not even to the “Harlot Whore”), and it was a terrible burden. “That secret has been with her for so long,” says Close. “It’s like a wound that’s badly covered over with scars.”
She admits now that she confessed to the wrong priest. “To me, in that moment, the only way to play it was truthfully, to find as much truth in it and the tragedy of her life and her inability to forgive,” says Close. “Having Josh O’Connor as my partner in that scene was just so wonderful.”
Even though Martha had tried to frame Father Jud for Wicks’s murder, Jud delivers grace to her in her final moments. “That goes to what Jud’s principles are, and I share them, to be honest,” says O’Connor. Rather than cast a stone, Jud puts his arms around her and attempts to understand her reality. “It doesn’t mean he agrees with her, but there is an understanding,” says the actor. “There’s a lot to be said for trying to understand someone’s … psyche.”
On the Sunday that they all learned about Cy’s parentage, Martha would have been able to get past Wicks’s transgression, but she tells Jud she couldn’t abide Cy’s wickedness. She was pushed on when she called the construction company and learned that Wicks planned to open his family crypt to steal the diamond. She didn’t want to see the church fall, as her purpose in life had been to protect it. “Your job as an actor is not to judge, [but] to understand the why of their behavior,” says Close. “And that journey to discover the why has always led me to have great empathy for the person I’m playing.”
Martha confesses all this to Jud and tops it off by taking a lethal dose of pentobarbital. She asks Jud to forgive her for what happened to Wicks, Nat, and Samson. And Jud makes her understand she should ask for forgiveness for what she did to Grace, too. She is safe now and can let her hatred go. “You’re really good at this,” she tells Jud as he absolves her of her sins.
Johnson explains that because of his empathy and love, Jud is able to bring Martha to a place where she can let go of the deeply ingrained, misogynistic hatred she’s held in her heart for decades. “The fact that she is able to be guided out of that through him to truly confess her darkest sin, because she trusts him by the end, is what makes that final moment, for me, very powerful,” says the writer-director. “It all comes from the humanity that Josh is bringing to Father Jud.”
Martha has one secret left, though. As she dies, we learn she was holding the jewel, and it falls out of her hands. Blanc backs away, wanting no association with that corrupt diamond.
After Martha’s confession, Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude shuts down for a while. Jud reopens it and invites Blanc to his first mass. “There’s nothing I’d rather not do,” he responds cheekily. The sign in front of the church now reads, “All are welcome.” And the church has a new name: Our Lady of Perpetual Grace.
“He unites his congregation and brings hope back to the church — hope, truth, and honesty,” says O’Connor.
Wicks’s flock scatters. Lee publishes a new book, Risen, with an unintended fan base. Vera moves away to chart a path that’s actually hers. Simone plays the cello again; she isn’t “cured” of her chronic pain, but she plays through it — “daily bread,” as Jud calls it. Cy is committed to tracking down the jewel, but Blanc and Jud reiterate that it wasn’t found. Cy refuses to hear that his real inheritance is in Christ.
Jud hides the jewel where it won’t corrupt anyone else. He builds a new wooden cross for the church, as the wall has been blank since Grace tore the old one down many years ago. He hides the jewel in the body of Christ on the cross. “I thought the symbolism of this jewel being hidden in the heart of this crucifix was really amazing,” says McCormack.
Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery is now streaming, only on Netflix.
