Wake Up Dead Man (2025)

PG-13, which is weird because --for some reason --I always associate these movies with R.  I don't think that there has been an R-rating in this franchise, despite the fact that they're a bit upsetting all around.  Obviously, these are murder mysteries.  Murder mysteries, by definition, must have murders in them.  With that, there's a bit of gore.  But the thing that escalates all of the violence and questionable content is the fact that it is in the shadow of the Church.  The villainous priest in this story tries to make the other priest uncomfortable by repeatingly stressing his sexual sins in detail.  Couple that with some blasphemous acts, you get a PG-13.

DIRECTOR:  Rian Johnson

As a great Mon Calamari admiral once said, "It's a trap."

This blog is a trap for me to stick my foot into it.  I was asked to watch this movie and now I know why.  What is going to realistically happen is that I'm going to have a take on faith and the Catholic Church.  While much of it might be in the spirit of what the Church teaches, I might get some of the nuance of theology wrong.  The notion of faith is so at the core of this movie that to take either side is only going to get me into trouble.  Well, I'm tired.  Not just today.  I'm tired of it all.  In many ways, right now, I've never been stronger in my faith.  But I've also never felt more alone in my entire faith journey.  There was one time in my life when I left the Church.  It was only for a year.  What I realized in that year was that I have a harder time with Catholics than I do with the Church.  Because I've absorbed that philosophy, I'm far past that feeling I had when I lost my faith all those years ago.  But then I have stuff like this that is beautifully challenging.  Still, I'm just waiting for someone to quote one line or to pass this blog around to other people to prove that I'm some kind of weird heretic.  

Still, I try.  So let's take some of the melodrama out of this intro and talk about what is ultimately a fun murder mystery made by a guy who has a complex relationship with Catholicism.  One of the things that is abundantly clear when watching the complete oeuvre of Rian Johnson is that he tends to lean pretty left.  I rewatched Knives Out fairly recently.  Like with Agatha Christie's Poirot, Benoit Blanc mysteries tend to set up the background with a cast of characters for Blanc to scrutinize.  But I'm realizing that Johnson might really have a problem with the fringes of conservatives.  I watched Knives Out with the eyes of a second Trump presidency this time.  Johnson often doesn't harp on his suspects.  But he also realized that those who make their personalities based on far-right ideologies creates a shortcut to unlikability.  There is a crazy shorthand that happens in these movies when they are introduced as far-right that explains their behavior for the entire film.  Now, the first film is a borderline agnostic film.  If there was a religious commentary in there, gosh if I can remember it.  

But Wake Up Dead Man doesn't even try to shy from the fact that it is a story about faith.  In Glass Onion, Johnson gave us so much background on Benoit Blanc by making him gay.  Maybe Johnson is somehow a master at giving us as little information about characters as possible while letting us feel like we know everything about them.  When Blanc walks into Fr. Jud's church, he's as open as he can be about finding nothing spiritual about the building he's walking into.  He has respect for Fr. Jud (remind me to talk about Fr. Jud's name, okay?), but finds his conviction for Christ to be naive.  Yes, the movie ends with Blanc talking about how he's like Paul, the scales removed from his eyes.  But Johnson is very clear.  Blanc is no closer to believing in Christ than when he started. 

I've been listening to You Made It Weird, Pete Holmes's podcast.  Holmes, as his comedian origin story, was formally a borderline-fundamentalist who got married too young, was cheated on, and got divorced.  That divorce led him away from organized religion, but left him spiritually seeking.  I'm in 2018 on the podcast and, at that point in his life, he refers to himself not as Christian, but as Christ-leaning.  The reason that I tell you this is because Holmes closes almost every podcast with a talk about God and faith.  I find it fascinating.  Binging these episodes is fascinating because he tends to have a lot of atheists on the podcasts.  Some of them simply don't care.  Some of them are quite learned about faith and what drives them away from faith communities.  Now, the well-learned atheists tend to land on at least two key points.  1) If faith and religion is making you a better person, most atheists tend to be live-and-let-live.  2) They also tend to almost unanimously believe that you don't need religion to be a good person.  

Keeping these thoughts in mind, Benoit Blanc (and, by extension, Rian Johnson) takes this Saul / Paul moment at the end of the film and tries to get a happy medium on the role of faith.  Blanc, as I stated, is no closer to Christ than he was at the beginning.  He finds it all to be part of a fairy tale.  Okay, that's his prerogative.  But he was also dismissive of those with faith as foolish because he tends to view the Church as the die hards of Monsignor Wicks.  These are the zealots.  They are so obsessed with their own salvation that they confuse salvation for exclusivity.  They not only see themselves as sinners who are working to get to heaven, but also have something unsaid in the revelry that comes with others failing to get to heaven.  And boy-oh-boy, do they want things to be old school gloom-and-doom.

One of my favorite priests, weirdly enough, is very old school.  I'm being vague because, in my praise for this man, I'm actually going to do something accidentally insulting.  I don't want to insult.  None of this is meant to be mean.  There's something incredibly attractive, especially for Catholics, to find a spiritual leader who is going to treat faith as something under siege.  As long as I've been in the Church, there has been this narrative that "our way is not the world's way."   Catholics tend to get their strength from the notion that we are oppressed.  Sometimes in history, this idea is absolutely true.  Looking at the Church as something mirroring the early Church, where martyrs were thrown to the lions sets a precedent that has kind of carried us through modern times.  The problem is that sometimes Catholics aren't the oppressed; they often are the oppressors.  That's the line-up of suspects in Wake Up Dead Man.  None of them are likable.  The closest thing we get to a sympathetic suspect is Simone, who goes through life every day in incredible pain.  Her cruelty comes from the desperation that there has to be an option beyond medical science.  It's sympathetic, even if it leads her to be kind of awful.

Again, in contrast to all of this is Fr. Jud.  I've had an epiphany over the past two years.  Okay, two epiphanies that are intimately related.  No one hates Star Wars more than a Star Wars fan and no Catholic is hated more than a Catholic who has slightly different views than another Catholic.  I kind of get it.  Like, going to Franciscan University, by all rights a pretty conservative Catholic institution, led people there to turn their noses up to Jesuits.  But those Franciscan University kids were often scorned for having guitars at Mass by the Latin Mass crowd.  It all makes sense.  Catholics are fundamentally about objective truth.  But a lot of those truths are uncomfortable.  Everything, as far as I can tell, about Fr. Jud is in line with Church teaching.  He holds the belief that forgiveness is central to grace.  He is a man who killed someone in the boxing ring and needs the world to be a place where acknowleding sin is the first step to making oneself better.  Yes, Hell probably exists for this character.  But he also doesn't do what he does out of fear of Hell. He does what he does because that's what Christ did.  The amount of time that he talks about his relationship with Christ is empowering.

Still, Fr. Jud is alone in this movie.  Okay, we have the bookending of the film where Fr. Jud is in conference with Bishop Langstrom.  Fr. Jud is sent to this parish because it is so tarnished by what I would consider zealotry and Christian Nationalism.  While Monsignor Wicks's parish is perhaps a bit extremist (leading to a diminished congregation, which makes it perfect for a murder mystery with a limited conglomeration of suspects), Johnson probably also admits that Fr. Jud is a breath of fresh air to much of what the Church looks like today.  

Now, I don't think that Fr. Jud is a stretch.  There have been all these articles that I've seen that Wake Up Dead Man is the most Christian movie of the year.  That's neither here nor there.  There are things that I borderline applauded and there were things in the movie that hurt my heart.  I do think that there are more Fr. Juds out there than even Monsignor Wickses.  If I'm being the most optimistic I can be, probably a lot of parish priests are a mix of both.  Some have more Jud; some have more Wicks.  Still, it doesn't really change that the commentary about the faith is something to at least contemplate.  The movie almost makes us wonder why we need such strongman shepherds. 

Yeah, this is a murder mystery.  In fact, it's a really cool murder mystery.  Between the Benoit Blanc mysteries and Poker Face, Rian Johnson might be the best mystery storyteller out there right now.  And from that perspective alone, golly this is a good movie.  It pulls two very difficult cards to pull off: the locked room mystery coupled with a startling resurrection.  Both of these elements have great solves coupled with some cool character stuff. But in the same way that the first one is about family and the second one is about celebrity, the mystery can be cool all day and it should really be about the message afterwards.  And this is the one that straight up puts the Catholic Church on the scales.  Yeah, it's incredible.  Sure, it gets wildly uncomfortable a lot of the time.  There are so many times in the movie that I wondered who I could recommend this movie to.  But it ultimately doesn't matter because the movie has its own legs to stand on. 

It's a great movie.  It's scary and thoughtful.  Some Catholics are going to love it.  Some are going to hate it.  From a faith perspective, it depressed me more than it should have.  But it doesn't meant that it wasn't exactly what I needed it to be.