Breaking Down the Twisty Ending of the New Knives Out Mystery Wake Up Dead Man
Warning: This post contains spoilers for Wake Up Dead Man.
When a “perfectly impossible” crime is committed at a rural upstate New York church, Southern-fried detective Benoit Blanc is quickly on the case. But this time around, Daniel Craig’s gentleman sleuth needs the help of boxer-turned-junior pastor Father Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor) to solve the twisty whodunnit at hand. Unfortunately, Jud also happens to be the prime suspect in the investigation into the murder of Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude’s fire-and-brimstone head priest, Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin).
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Written and directed by Knives Out and Glass Onion filmmaker Rian Johnson, the new Knives Out mystery Wake Up Dead Man diverges from its predecessors’ Agatha Christie roots to delve into the fraught cultural landscape surrounding religion in America. “The reality is that this film did not start with a mystery book at all. It was the idea of, ‘Can I make a fun Benoit Blanc murder mystery that examines the issue of faith in America right now?'” Johnson told Gold Derby. I grew up very, very Christian, and I’m not anymore. The actual starting point, more than a specific Agatha Christie book, was, ‘Can I genuinely examine this complicated, touchy issue in a way that feels more than just finger-wagging, but at the same time doesn’t tiptoe around the subject?'”
However, if you could draw parallels between Wake Up Dead Man and a classic crime book, Johnson explained it would be John Dickson Carr’s 1935 novel The Hollow Man—also published under the American title The Three Coffins—rather than a Christie tale. “[Carr is] an author who was a contemporary of Christie’s and someone who I got very into,” he said. “He specialized in the locked-door mystery, and his books all had more of an Edgar Allen Poe-style gothic tone to them. There’s a reason we namecheck them in the movie. I owe quite a bit to [Carr] with this one.”
Now streaming on Netflix following a limited theatrical release, Wake Up Dead Man delivers an intricate locked-room puzzle that is set up as follows: After preaching a vitriol-fueled Good Friday homily, Wicks falls dead in a sealed chamber directly off the church’s altar, mere feet from where Jud has stepped up to the pulpit to continue addressing Wicks’ small but loyal congregation. When Jud goes to check on Wicks, there is a crucial nine-second window where he’s out of sight, thus making it seem as though he was the only one capable of stabbing Wicks with the knife that’s found plunged into his back. Despite Jud’s distaste for both Wicks’ incendiary rhetoric and manipulative treatment of his parishioners, he swears he is innocent—and Blanc seems to believe him.
But if Jud didn’t do it, then who did? And perhaps more perplexingly, how?
Who killed Wicks?
Before we dive into the identity of the culprit, it’s important to remember who the other players in the Wake Up Dead Man game are. There’s Glenn Close as Martha Delacroix, the church’s longtime administrator; Kerry Washington as Vera Draven, Wicks’ discontented attorney; Daryl McCormack as Cy Draven, Vera’s apparent half-brother and a failed, would-be far-right politician; Jeremy Renner as Dr. Nat Sharp, a local physician struggling with alcoholism in the wake of his divorce; Andrew Scott as Lee Ross, a once best-selling sci-fi author attempting to rally his declining sales with a book about Wicks; Cailee Spaeny as Simone Vivane, a former star concert cellist sidelined by a chronic nerve condition; and Thomas Haden Church as Samson Holt, Martha’s lover and the church’s kindly groundskeeper.
While all of Wicks’ congregants could have a motive to kill him, in the end, it turns out to be Dr. Nat who committed the actual murder. After realizing there was a second devil’s head lamp adornment stolen from the bar where Jud swiped the one he threw through the church’s window prior to the murder, Blanc is able to deduce that Nat had sewn one of the devil’s heads, which he had filled with a small squib of blood, to Wicks’ vestment and spiked Wicks’ secret flask with a tranquilizer to knock him out. Nat then used a radio frequency remote to trigger the squib after Wicks was knocked out, tricking Jud into believing Wicks was already dead when he went to check on him. When Nat entered the room to pretend to examine Wicks’ body, he covertly switched out the first devil’s head and stabbed Wicks with a knife attached to the second one, killing him. However, he failed to remove the final piece of evidence, the drug-laced flask, as Jud had hidden it out of sight believing he was doing a good deed for Wicks’ flock by keeping his alcoholism a secret.
Who else was involved?
After outing Nat as the murderer, Blanc intends to deliver his “final checkmate over the mysteries of faith.” However, he instead ends up clearing the church to allow Martha, the mastermind of the operation, to come forward and confess on her own.
Having grown up attending the church, Martha was the only person who the founder of Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude, Wicks’ late grandfather Prentice (James Faulkner), had trusted with the secret hiding place of the Eve’s Apple diamond he had poured his entire fortune into: his stomach. Following Prentice’s death and burial in his mausoleum, Wicks’ mother, Grace (Annie Hamilton), had ransacked the chapel searching for the diamond in her desperation to escape her life of shame and mistreatment at the church, but died in her pursuit of it.
In the wake of Jud’s arrival at the church, Martha had been inspired to finally confess the location of the diamond to Wicks. But after discovering he was planning to open his grandfather’s crypt and desecrate his body to locate the diamond, sell it, and use the money to gain far greater power alongside Cy—who had been revealed as Wicks’ illegitimate son rather than Vera’s father’s—Martha devised a plan with Nat and Samson to kill Wicks and fake his resurrection in order to restore faith in the church.
Martha’s intention was for Samson to take Wicks’ place in his coffin and emerge from the mausoleum with the Eve’s Apple diamond secretly in hand. Wicks’ apparent resurrection would be caught on the church’s camera and witnessed by Nat, who would be posing as Samson. But Martha didn’t account for Jud turning up at the moment of the staged resurrection and Nat’s greed getting the better of him. After knocking Jud out, Nat killed Samson and took Eve’s Apple for himself, leaving an unconscious Jud to believe he was responsible for Samson’s death when he awoke.
When Martha found Samson dead, she grew suspicious of Nat’s intentions and went to his home, where they were planning on disposing of Wicks’ body in a vat of acid, to confirm her misgivings. Nat tried to poison Martha’s tea and keep the diamond, but Martha figured out his plan and switched the teacups when he wasn’t looking. She then arranged Wicks’ body to look like he had died forcing Nat into the acid.
Following her confession, Martha collapses into Jud’s arms, revealing she had also ingested a dose of the poison prior to re-entering the church. In her final moments, Martha asks for forgiveness for all her sins, including, at Jud’s urging, the ones she committed against a desperate Grace. Jud and Blanc are then able to keep the diamond from falling into Cy’s hands and Jud ultimately hides it away forever in the new crucifix he constructs for the church.