Fans of the beloved Knives Out film franchise will not be surprised to see detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) make a dramatic entrance at a crucial point in its latest installment, Wake Up Dead Man. They may, however, be surprised to see him make that entrance as a direct answer to prayer.
And Blanc keeps things off-kilter as he quickly proclaims himself a determined rationalist, totally uninterested in anything that the priest who was just praying for help might have to offer him, except for his assistance in solving a murder. But before that business is cleared up, Blanc will be drawn into a struggle that will show him a new and unsuspected side of faith.
The thoughtful, twisty, deeply layered film offers up two clashing versions of Christianity in the persons of the two priests at its center, who serve uneasily together at a tiny Catholic church, Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude, in woodsy upstate New York. Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin) has built a small but fanatically loyal following in his decades at the church, which was founded by his grandfather, a widowed priest. Father Jud Duplenticy, Wicks’s new assistant, played in a heartfelt performance by Josh O’Connor, has been sent there as a punitive measure after punching an obnoxious deacon.
Given this background, it might startle you to learn that Msgr. Wicks is the one with an anger problem.
Because every human being has a sinful heart, the church and the world alike are full of wolves. But even wolves, Father Jud dares to suggest, might need help and guidance.
Father Jud knows that his hot temper is a bad thing, a vice that goes against everything he believes in—a vice that, in his earlier days as a teenage boxer, led him to kill a man in the ring. The young priest knows what it is to feel “hate in [his] heart,” and that knowledge has stayed with him, shaping him every day. He diligently and faithfully works to overcome his vice of anger, and though the film’s audience can’t be too condemning of his failures (as they tend to be hilarious), he repents each one with sincerity. As he explains to his dubious parishioners, “Christ … didn’t transform me; He sustains me every day.”
Unlike Father Jud, Msgr. Wicks is not naturally prone to flare-ups of anger. Instead, as a master manipulator, he uses it. He carefully cultivates anger in those same parishioners, to strengthen their ties to him. He whips up their fears of the modern world—“feminist Marxist whores,” as he colorfully puts it—and encourages them to fight back against it at every opportunity.
Father Jud suspects that the “core group” of Wicks loyalists doesn’t really believe this bellicose rhetoric, that it simply “scratches an itch” for them. That belief is called into question later in the film, when the group discovers an act of blatant hypocrisy committed by their beloved priest—an act about which he’s smugly unrepentant.
In a true gut-punch of a scene, they cling all the tighter to their connection with him, believing that, shameless sinner or not, Msgr. Wicks alone can protect them from all the worldly evils that he’s taught them to fear. (If this paradox triggers any powerful real-life memories for the average viewer, that’s no accident.)
But the anger that Wicks has nurtured within the “hardened cyst” of his followers, as Father Jud terms them, won’t be directed outward forever. And this points us back to a central theme of the film, one stated much earlier when a fellow priest was chastising Father Jud for striking the archbishop. Fighting within the church is particularly bad, this priest explains, because “A priest is a shepherd. The world is a wolf.”
But as Father Jud becomes increasingly aware, and as Blanc is aware almost from the moment he arrives on the scene, such divisions are artificial at best and dangerous at worst. Because every human being has a sinful heart, the church and the world alike are full of wolves. But even wolves, Father Jud dares to suggest, might need help and guidance. The answer is not more anger, or redirected anger, but a love that overcomes anger.
Writer/director Rian Johnson skillfully incorporates elements into the film’s setting that show the scars that anger has left on the church. Up on the wall above the altar is the shadow left by a giant crucifix, which was torn down years before by Wicks’s mother, Grace (Annie Hamilton), in a desperate rage. Wicks refuses to put up a new crucifix, wanting everyone in the congregation to instead be faced with a perpetual reminder of the act committed by “the harlot-whore”—his term for his mother.
But whose anger, and what kind of anger, do that broken cross and scarred wall really signify? Did Grace’s sacrilegious act truly threaten the church? Or could the real threat be coming from the faithful?
Johnson is calling us to look deeper, to follow the pattern established by the two priests and played out throughout the film. And that’s not the only pattern to watch. There’s a related thread winding through the story, a pattern of women being trapped and exploited. Many viewers will find it sadly unsurprising that even this pattern, once brought to light, doesn’t bother most of Msgr. Wicks’s followers. Why would it? After all, they’re used to women being called “whores” and portrayed as dangerous.
Contrast this, again, with Father Jud’s actions: In one of the film’s most poignant scenes, he grinds the whole murder investigation to a halt at a crisis point, just to take time to pray with a woman in distress (Bridget Everett). As for the women who were hurt by the church, justice for them will prove absolutely essential to the resolution of Wake Up Dead Man and to the redemption that it holds out.
The murder mystery at the heart of the film is a complicated one, but perhaps it has to be. So many thematic strands are braided into it. The anger and fear we’ve been examining plays a key role. So do the misogyny, greed, and lust for power that were tragically passed down through the generations, spurring on that anger and that fear. But Father Jud’s faith, genuine enough to win the reluctant respect of “proud heretic” Blanc, quietly but unmistakably plays its part as well, bringing healing and hope in a place where all those sins have led to violence.
Maybe it’s doing a strange, disconcerting thing with biblical metaphors to propose that there’s a shepherd even for the wolves. But Wake Up Dead Man hints that, because of the wolfish instincts in all of us, we should hope that’s true.
