Wake Up Dead Man Proves Just How Seriously Rian Johnson Takes His Agatha Christie Roots [TIFF 2025]

“Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery” premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival this week, and so far the reviews have been glowing. A lot of the praise has been heaped on the gothic vibes, as well as the charming scrappy performance from co-lead Josh O’Connor, but I think the biggest achievement is how fresh the movie feels. “Wake Up Dead Man” is definitely not a repeat of “Glass Onion,” nor is it a repeat of “Knives Out,” and that’s the best thing about it.

The first two “Knives Out” films were all about class: skewering first the old-money rich with the Harlan family, and then the new-money rich with Miles Bron. “Wake Up Dead Man,” though, is all about religion, and it’s not just here to skewer it. There are a few repeated motifs from the earlier films (notably, writer/director Rian Johnson can’t resist including a right-wing influencer-type character), but for the most part “Wake Up Dead Man” feels like its own special thing. 

This is a relief for a couple of reasons, the most obvious one being that the franchise had so far avoided offering us a proper whodunnit. “Knives Out” appeared to solve the murder in the first act, and the murder in “Glass Onion” turned out to be deceptively, comically easy to solve. (This may have been on purpose, but it’s easy to see why not everyone was on board.) This franchise couldn’t afford to pull another stunt like that; it had to give us a serious, proper whodunnit this time, not another major subversion of the whodunnit formula. 

The other relief is that this proves Johnson wasn’t kidding in 2022 when he said he wanted these movies to function like Agatha Christie novels. He said he wanted to “do an entirely new mystery every time, a new location, a new rogues’ gallery of characters.” Most important to Johnson were the constant shifts in tone, structure, and thematic scope. As he put it:

“[Christie] was mixing genres, she was throwing crazy narrative spins that have never been done in whodunnits before. She was keeping the audience on their toes, and every single book had a whole new reason for being.”

Agatha Christie fans can understand exactly what Johnson was talking about. Christie wrote over sixty novels throughout her lifetime, all of which were playing not only with murder mystery expectations but, especially by the height of her fame, with the expectations readers had for Christie herself. Johnson is now pulling off the same feat in movie form.

A fun similarity between Christie’s Hercules Poirot and Johnson’s Benoit Blanc is how much their roles in each story vary. Sometimes they’re held at arm’s length by the narrative (“The Murder of Roger Ackroyd,” “Knives Out”), and sometimes they’re the point-of-view character from the start (“Murder on the Orient Express,” “Glass Onion”). While watching “Wake Up Dead Man,” the Christie novel that first came to my mind was her 1928 book “Murder on the Blue Train,” in which Poirot doesn’t show up until nearly a third of the way through. Blanc doesn’t show up until around the same point in “Wake Up Dead Man,” and he brings an extra burst of energy into the story when he does. 

It’s Christie’s sheer range that made her rise above the other mystery writers of her time, and it’s what will hopefully allow the “Knives Out” franchise to stay a notch above the rest of the mystery movie genre. Christie wasn’t a one-trick pony and neither is Johnson, which is good because the fun of “Knives Out” will end the moment it feels like Johnson’s out of things to say. 

That sense of fatigue’s already been felt in another big buzzworthy anthology series, “The White Lotus.” That’s a show that similarly changes its cast and setting with each season, but by season 3 has already repeated itself a little too often. It’s hard not to feel like showrunner Mike White is running out of things to say about rich people on vacation, and the big question of season 4 is whether he can adequately counter that growing complaint. 

That’s a problem Rian Johnson doesn’t have yet. There are plenty of potential criticisms some viewers might have of “Wake Up Dead Man” when it makes its wide theatrical release on November 26, 2025, but “same old same old” won’t be one of them.