Wake Up Dead Man
Benoit Blanc is back — but not in the way you might expect. In this episode, we dig into Wake Up Dead Man, the third entry in Rian Johnson’s Knives Out series, and quickly realise this isn’t just another playful, sun-drenched whodunnit. The tone is darker, stranger, and far more morbid than Knives Out or Glass Onion, leaning hard into religious imagery, guilt, confession, and moral rot. Set around a remote church and a fire-and-brimstone priest, the film opens with what looks like an impossib...
Benoit Blanc is back — but not in the way you might expect.
In this episode, we dig into Wake Up Dead Man, the third entry in Rian Johnson’s Knives Out series, and quickly realise this isn’t just another playful, sun-drenched whodunnit. The tone is darker, stranger, and far more morbid than Knives Out or Glass Onion, leaning hard into religious imagery, guilt, confession, and moral rot.
Set around a remote church and a fire-and-brimstone priest, the film opens with what looks like an impossible murder: a man stabbed in a sealed room, in full view of his congregation. From there, Blanc circles a tight group of suspects — each with motive, history, and secrets — as the film toys with classic murder-mystery rules… and then quietly breaks a few of them.
What we talk about in the episode:
- The tonal shift — why this feels closer to gothic noir than cosy Agatha Christie
- Religion, confession, and judgment as thematic engines, not just window dressing
- Whether the mystery is too Scooby-Doo or intentionally rejecting “fair-play” sleuthing
- A stacked cast and who actually makes an impact (and who doesn’t)
- Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc: more observer than solver this time — for better or worse
- The film’s final act, revelations, and why it left us oddly unsatisfied despite clever ideas
- How it stacks up against Knives Out (still the gold standard) and Glass Onion (the loudest sibling)
We also get into a broader debate about modern murder mysteries, Netflix’s influence on structure and pacing, and whether this series is drifting away from the thing that made it work in the first place: watching a brilliant detective actually do the detecting.
If you like your whodunnits bleak, talky, and a little unholy — or if you just want to hear us wrestle with a film that’s clever, flawed, and deliberately frustrating — this one’s for you.
🎧 Listen to the full episode for the deep dive, the disagreements, and our verdict on whether Wake Up Dead Man is a bold evolution… or a mystery that forgets to be fun.
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Until next time, we remain...
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