The third installment of the Knives Out films, Wake Up Dead Man, is now in theaters. But don’t feel bad if you didn’t notice. It’s an extremely limited release in just a tiny handful of theaters before it starts its Netflix run tomorrow on December 12. It’s not an ideal arrangement for a movie with big commercial possibilities, and writer-director Rian Johnson made his unhappiness known in public comments right out of the gate.

In this, Johnson was prescient, because Wake Up Dead Man has done anemic business so far compared to the first two films of the franchise, Knives Out and Glass Onion. All this despite very strong reviews. This is partly explained by some brutal yet increasingly typical facts of Netflix theatrical releases:

Netflix was unable to book the top three circuits — AMC, Regal, and Cinemark — who were insisting on a 30-day theatrical window like Glass Onion’s, not a 17-day theatrical window. Hence, Wake Up Dead Man wound up playing the arthouse Alamo, Landmark, and mom-and-pop-circuits. In addition, the movie didn’t get a theatrical P&A campaign like Glass Onion did. Johnson himself took to social media and, in answering a fan, expressed, “I’m as frustrated as you that it’s not everywhere.”

Wake Up Dead Man joins other recent Netflix movies such as Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, Kathryn Bigelow’s House of Dynamite, and Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly in barely there seventeen-day releases in arthouse theaters followed by Netflix streaming premieres a few days later. But it’s especially notable in the case of Wake Up Dead Man, which is the third film in a hugely popular franchise. In spite of the comparative lack of publicity and with the knowledge that it’d be available for streaming in a matter of days, Wake Up Dead Man still managed to sell out theaters in over five-hundred locations. The movie also garnered rave reviews from critics, racking up a sterling 92 percent Rotten Tomatoes score.

I was a bit surprised at the glowing critical reception. A number of reviewers have claimed that Wake Up Dead Man brought the franchise back to its initial level of inspired mystery plotting, scintillating performances, and surefire direction after the convoluted tech world shenanigans in Glass Onion disappointed so many fans.

I enjoyed Wake Up Dead Man, but if you’re looking for the sterling amusements of the original Knives Out, it’s nowhere near that level. In fact, it’s a really odd movie, which is mostly what I liked about it. To give you some idea, Wake Up Dead Man begins with Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) reading the very, very, very long written account of the events leading up to the murder at the heart of the film. The account was written by a young Catholic priest named Reverend Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor) as he takes over his duties at his new parish.

We see these events in flashback, of course. But they make for an extremely protracted prologue before we even get to Blanc’s investigation. The movie has an ungainly structure overall, lurching through a series of unlikely revelations about the sinister parish in rural upstate New York and the possible guilt of various core parishioners who are held in thrall by the weird charismatic dominance of Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin).

It’s no surprise that Wicks is the one who gets murdered, stabbed in the back during mass when he retreats briefly to a small storage area near the pulpit after his typically fiery homily.  His murder “onstage,” so to speak, is one of those “impossible crime” plots that old-time mystery writers specialized in, with John Dickson Carr specifically cited in the film as the master.

In the knotty backstory, we learn that Wicks was the grandson of Reverend Prentice Wicks, who had also held sway over the Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude parish until his death. He’d promised his fortune to Wicks’s high-living mother, Grace (Annie Hamilton), “the harlot whore” who went wild when the fortune disappeared and tore the whole church apart looking for it, destroying the large wooden crucifix at the front. The dark-minded Jefferson Wicks refuses to replace it, leaving a ghostly smudged outline in its stead that supposedly represents the ultimate in evil.

If this tale of a crucifix-free church and its dark, dynastic succession doesn’t sound much like the really-existing Catholic Church, it’s probably because in making Wake Up Dead Man, Johnson was drawing on his own upbringing in the hardcore Protestant church, “very much in the evangelical kind of Christian-Reagan era and everything that entails.” No longer a believer himself, Johnson has given Benoit Blanc an acerbic atheism that accords with Daniel Craig’s views — “He’s very much [more] on Blanc’s side than Jud’s in terms of religion” — while allowing Jud’s intense belief in Christ to have some softening effect on Blanc’s views in the end.

So why Roman Catholicism? “Most of the churches I grew up going to kind of looked like Pottery Barns.” For Johnson, a murder mystery in a modern megachurch would simply look far too tacky. “Catholicism absolutely carries the day in terms of aesthetics.”

As Reverend Jud Duplenticy, O’Connor carries much of the narrative. In this franchise, the role of the chief suspect is always given to an “up and comer” in the industry, following Ana de Armas in the original Knives Out and Janelle Monáe in Glass Onion. O’Connor here is completely up to the task, a brilliant performer without being showy. After extensive experience on stage and in television, he’s heading toward stardom with a series of major roles in a wide variety of recent films helmed by respected directors such as Alice Rohrwacher’s La chimera (2023), Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers (2024), Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind (2025), and the upcoming Joel Coen film, Jack of Spades.

O’Connor even manages to carry off the “fighting priest” aspect of his character — Jud apparently was a boxer before joining the clergy, only impelled toward religion after he killed a man in the ring. Jud’s violent tendencies also got him kicked out of his position as an urban priest after he punched a deacon in the face for an insult. His exile to a very small, very weird parish in upstate New York is just one step up from being defrocked.

As usual, this very peculiar yet intermittently engrossing tale spun by Johnson is loaded with lurid characters played by major actors, most of whom are suspects. There’s Jefferson Wicks’s fiercely dedicated “church lady” (Glenn Close), the emotionally collapsing town doctor (Jeremy Renner), the uptight lawyer who sacrificed much for the church (Kerry Washington), the would-be media influencer and failed politician (Daryl McCormack), the best-selling author who’s retreated to smalltown life and developed a religious mania centered on Wicks (Andrew Scott), a mysteriously disabled former concert cellist hoping for a miracle cure (Cailee Spaeny), and the taciturn, ex-alcoholic church groundskeeper (Thomas Haden Church).

After the murder, the local police chief in charge of the case is played by Mila Kunis. And Jeffrey Wright gives a gem of a comic performance in a tiny role as the caustic bishop who assigns Jud to Wicks’s parish. The quality and impact of the performances are as jaggedly uneven as the plotting, with O’Connor, Craig, Brolin, and Close taking the acting honors while others like Spaeny and Church get lost in the shuffle of actors trying to make their mark in this franchise.

Still, for all its oddball awkwardness, Wake Up Dead Man seems more grounded and memorable than the flighty, scrambled Glass Onion. If you like the franchise, you’ll probably find it a pleasure overall. And if I haven’t already made it clear, I like the franchise.

It’s the kind of movie made for a big screen and a big audience. Too bad Netflix would rather doom it to the black hole of streaming.