THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS.

Who doesn’t love the Knives Out franchise? Couldn’t be me! I’ve had Wake Up Dead Man on my watchlist for two years now, and the wait to watch was finally over tonight. I haven’t yet been disappointed—nay, I haven’t yet been anything short of enthralled—by the Knives Out franchise, and Wake Up Dead Man may have actually made a case for the best entry in the franchise, though it has been a bit since I watched the first Knives Out, so who knows.

I’m wholly obsessed with Rian Johnson resuscitating the whodunnit over the last decade, and the mystery at the heart of Wake Up Dead Man was as engaging and hard to solve on my own as ever. Johnson yet again did a perfect job making almost every single player in the movie look like the most likely culprit at some point, only to turn the entire thing on its head in the reveal. By movie number 3, though, it has become clear that Johnson is as interested in the tropes of the whodunnit as subverting them, and the way he did that in Wake Up Dead Man was awesome.

It would ostensibly be a slippery slope to frame a crime movie in the American Christian church, but good on Rian Johnson for pushing people’s buttons a little bit. I loved how the story wasn’t afraid to expose the inconsistencies and evils of the modern church while also making room for the validation of spirituality. Never did Johnson openly critique the practice of faith or religion; rather, he tore down the institutions and the evils that they propagate, which is obviously a discussion worth having. He left the strictly religious practices of Christianity alone for the most part, and even included that really powerful scene of Josh O’Connor praying for someone over the phone to make the line he drew very clear. That may have been the very best scene of the movie, no joke.

Every performance was stellar—which I expected from not only a Rian Johnson cast, but this one specifically—with the Joshes (O’Connor and Brolin) stealing scene after scene. I don’t know who I liked more, and that’s a great problem to have. Some of the cast felt underused—Kerry Washington especially—but with so many players, that’s bound to happen. This may also be recency bias talking, but Wake Up Dead Man felt like the prettiest Knives Out movie to date. There were so many shots and different lighting techniques and uses of color that impressed me, which makes sense, given the stained-glass, divine nature of the church. It’d be a shame for this movie to not be visually stunning.

I’m not sure if I feel happy or sad for Rian Johnson, since there’s no way that any studio is going to want him to make anything other than a whodunnit from now on. He’s proven to be the very best at it—and maybe even the only one doing them right now—and you know what, I’d be sad if I saw a Rian Johnson movie coming out that wasn’t a whodunnit, too. Thanks to the perfect balance between gripping mystery, unexpected but committed humor, and a careful attack against institutionalized religion, Wake Up Dead Man certainly has a case as the very best Knives Out film, and will definitely sit among 2025’s best movies.