Commentary: The new ‘Knives Out’ film blessedly avoids Hollywood’s typical treatment of Christians

When Benoit Blanc, played by Daniel Craig, struts — he is a twinkly private detective from Louisiana who loves his brilliance and his three-piece suits, so he can’t help but strut — into the empty church at the heart of “Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery,” the new murder mystery written and directed by Rian Johnson, he sees no crucifix above the altar. There is only a faded mark where, long ago, one once hung.

Blanc wonders at its absence, and so do we. But unlike the first Blanc movie, “Knives Out,” or its sequel, “Glass Onion,” Blanc is a supporting character here. Josh O’Connor’s Father Jud Duplenticy, a young priest recently arrived in the parish, is the movie’s protagonist, and he knows precisely what that faded spot means. There is, to be sure, a murder in this movie and it is, to be doubly sure, solved. But what this film is really about is Father Jud trying to figure out who Jesus is.

The Benoit Blanc movies are energetic, snappy blasts in which Johnson puts Agatha Christie through a series of workouts in the gym of contemporary American cultural politics. These movies are bursting with influencers and selfies, arguments about immigration and billionaires, Teslas and “IN THIS HOUSE” signs. To Johnson’s credit, they usually manage a light touch. The satire rarely becomes thudding.

“Wake Up Dead Man” takes on contemporary American Christianity, and I found it deeply relieving.

Few cliches in Hollywood filmmaking grate on me more than the hypocritical Christian. Over and over again, whenever a filmmaker introduces a Christian character, I brace myself, waiting for the moment when the preacher will be revealed to be secretly embezzling from the church’s fund for orphans or clenches his jaw and declares that Jesus has decided all fornicators must be scalped. This poor horse was nearly dead when Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote “The Scarlet Letter” some 180 years ago, and should not be made to stumble around the track for the thousandth time, throwing a shoe and wheezing for breath.

The first book that described Christian hypocrisy is, of course, the Gospel of Mark. That Christians can be cowardly and cruel — despite Jesus’ teachings not to be — is hardly a stunning insight.

Refreshing look at religion

Part of the problem, of course, is that the religious right has spent the past half-century attempting to convince Christians that voting for politicians who support laws regulating sexual behavior is a key expression of their faith. And in the past 10 years, scholars who study the term “evangelical” have found that more and more people are claiming the term to indicate hostility to left-leaning politics rather than to signal, say, that they go to church or spend much time with the Bible.

So we shouldn’t be surprised that some filmmakers seem to believe that Christians are humorless prudes and probably hypocrites. But to simply take this manifestation as the whole possibility of what Christianity might be exhibits a lack of curiosity.

Which is why a movie like “Wake Up Dead Man” is so refreshing, because Johnson, who was raised an evangelical, sees the possibility of multiple Christianities struggling with one another for authority over the lives of believers. The movie is full of subtle biblical allusions — a housekeeper named Martha, a solemn declaration that a tomb is empty. Johnson wants us to think about what it really means to follow Jesus, a question the biblical Martha and the disciples who wondered at Jesus’ empty tomb struggled with.

The most pivotal relationship in the film is between Father Jud and Jefferson Wicks, a senior priest consumed with the abstracted battles of social media politics. He sees his mission as “holding the line” against “feminists, Marxists, and whores,” though these villains don’t seem thick on the ground in the small town where he lives, and it is unclear how preaching sermons with titles like “There’s G-O-D in DOGE” and “Racism Does Not Exist in God’s Kingdom (USA)” is helping. He tells Father Jud that the church has “lost so much ground,” but he doesn’t seem to care that only half a dozen people show up for his services. In fact, he prefers a small congregation as long as they agree with him.

Wicks, of course, is a stereotype of his own, but he’s also a foil for Blanc. When the detective shows up to solve the murder (and you’ll have to watch to find out who gets killed), he brings his own circus with him. He enjoys fame as much as Wick does — but his cachet comes from his steel-trap mind and capacity for deducing and explaining the crime. We’ve already seen him do this in two movies, of course. He dismisses Duplenticy’s faith, declaring “I kneel at the altar of the rational.”

And then there’s Father Jud. An ex-boxer who accidently killed somebody in the ring, Duplenticy found relief from guilt in Jesus’ promise of forgiveness. He is caught up first in disputes with Wicks and then with Blanc’s high-wire detective show, but about halfway through the film, Duplenticy suddenly yanks himself back to earth.

Blanc has sent Father Jud on a mission to find clues, and he’s on the phone with a woman named Louise, who won’t stop talking. Duplenticy is not really listening, trying to get off the call so he can get back in the game, when the woman abruptly breaks down, confesses to the priest that her mother is enduring a painful illness, and begs him to pray with her.

The real meat and heart of Christianity

Josh O’Connor’s acting here is remarkable. You can see his character remember himself, seize himself, remind himself what’s important. He shoos away Blanc, sits on a couch, and says, “I’m so sorry, Louise. You’re not alone. I’m right here. I’m here.”

This is small-scale, everyday stuff, but for Johnson, that’s where the real meat and heart of Christianity sit. Wicks’ grumpy yelling about Marxism and Blanc’s gleeful jousting over whether God is a rational proposition get attention, but it’s Father Jud who is actually doing the work, trying, as they say, to be like Jesus. It’s Father Jud who actually makes a difference in somebody’s life.

And though Blanc inevitably turns down Father Jud’s invitation to a Mass, the priest changes the detective more than vice versa. At the end of the film, when he is winding up to deliver his stem-winder reveal of who did it and how, Blanc notices that dramatically pulling back the curtain as he so loves to do would harm a person who needs Jud’s pastoral care far more than his own intellectual pyrotechnics. And so he, as Father Jud did earlier in the movie, pauses, breathes, steps back and allows the priest to step in. It’s a graceful moment, and it illustrates an alternate, and fuller, version of Christianity than Wicks gives us — a religion built of small, quiet, personal gifts of grace.

Those moments are not the stuff of Netflix hits or internet clicks, but they’re none the less real for that.

Note to readers • Matthew Bowman is the Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University and the author of 2024’s “Joseph Fielding Smith: A Mormon Theologian,” and co-author of 2025’s “Game Changers: AJ Dybantsa, BYU, and the Struggle for the Soul of Basketball.” This story is available to Salt Lake Tribune subscribers only. Thank you for supporting local journalism.