If the Knives Out movies have a magic trick, it’s that they keep getting bigger without getting bloated. Rian Johnson takes a cozy, old-fashioned whodunnit engine and keeps swapping out what the murder “means.” Not in a pretentious way. In a “wow, this is suddenly about the whole world, isn’t it?” way.
The crimes stay intimate, but the stakes keep expanding: from family money, to cultural power, to belief itself. And by the time Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery rolls around, the series isn’t only asking who killed whom. It’s asking what people will do to belong, and what leaders can make a crowd believe.
The First Film Turns Inheritance Into a Moral Stress Test
The original Knives Out works because it’s shamelessly specific. It isn’t “rich people are bad” in the abstract. It’s rich people being petty in a very familiar way, inside a very specific house, circling a very specific pile of money.
Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer) is dead, and the question isn’t only who did it. It’s who deserves anything he left behind. That’s why the will reveal hits like a grenade. Marta Cabrera (Ana de Armas) becomes the inheritor, and the Thrombey family reacts like they’ve been spiritually evicted.
The mystery format becomes a pressure chamber for entitlement: Linda (Jamie Lee Curtis), Walt (Michael Shannon), Joni (Toni Collette), even the smug little satellite cousins, all convinced the universe owes them a payout.
Glass Onion Turns the Murder Into a Fight Over Reality
If Knives Out is about who gets the house, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery is about who gets to define the world. It swaps the gothic inheritance vibe for a modern cult of personality: Miles Bron (Edward Norton), a tech billionaire who has built an orbit of people who rely on him financially, socially, and psychologically.
The genius of Glass Onion is that it understands something very contemporary: power now runs through narrative. Not just money. Story. Branding. Access. Plausible deniability delivered with a smile. Characters like Birdie Jay (Kate Hudson) and Duke Cody (Dave Bautista) don’t feel like “types” so much as warning labels. They’re people who confuse visibility with value and mistake proximity to power for power itself.
Wake Up Dead Man Raises the Stakes by Putting the Mystery Inside Belief
With Wake Up Dead Man, the series shifts again, and it’s a smart pivot: it puts the mystery in a church community in upstate New York, with Johnson explicitly framing the film around faith. That’s not a set dressing choice. It’s a stakes choice.
Because faith is different from inheritance and celebrity. You can argue about a will. You can expose a fraud. Faith is trickier. It’s personal. It’s communal. It can be beautiful. It can be exploited. And in this film, the central crime is an “impossible” one that erupts in a place built on ritual and certainty.
The church setting also lets Wake Up Dead Man play with hierarchy in a new way. Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin) isn’t just a powerful guy with a fortune. He’s a powerful guy with a pulpit. Father Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor), a boxer turned priest, functions as the emotional entry point, which fits the series pattern of giving Blanc a case anchor who has the most to lose.
Benoit Blanc Keeps Changing Because the Stakes Keep Changing
One of the quiet triumphs of this trilogy is that Blanc never becomes a superhero. He’s consistent, but he’s not static. Each film positions him differently relative to the world he’s investigating.
In Knives Out, he’s a gentleman observer who can smell the rot in a family story. With Glass Onion, he’s practically allergic to the performative nonsense of the influencer-billionaire ecosystem. For Wake Up Dead Man, he walks into a community built on belief, ritual, and unspoken rules, and he has to solve a case without flattening the emotional reality of the space.
Johnson has said he assumes the audience is smart, and that the movies can’t rely on cheap misdirection. They have to work as propulsive films, not just puzzles. That approach explains why the stakes escalate. If you’re not trying to “gotcha” the viewer, you need a different kind of escalation. You raise the emotional cost and make the motive matter. You make the community around the murder feel like a miniature version of something bigger.
The Escalation Is the Point, Not a Side Effect
It would be easy for a third film to go bigger in a lazy way. More explosions, locations and famous faces. Wake Up Dead Man goes bigger in a weirder, braver direction: it makes the “room” where the mystery happens morally charged.
A church is a place where people rehearse their values out loud. It’s also a place where hypocrisy can hide in plain sight because everyone has agreed on the language. That makes it perfect for a whodunnit that wants to dig into ideology without turning into a lecture. And because this is Knives Out, the tone can still snap between humor and dread, between a silly alibi and a genuinely unsettling revelation.
Where This Leaves the Series
Across three films, Johnson has essentially taken the same genre machine and fed it different societal anxieties. First: wealth as inheritance and entitlement. Second: power as brand and narrative control. Third: ideology as belonging, authority, and the hunger for certainty.
That escalation doesn’t make the mysteries feel less fun. It makes them feel sharper. The deaths aren’t random chess moves. They’re the flashpoint where a whole community’s logic finally breaks. And as long as the series keeps treating motive as worldview, not just greed, it can keep getting bigger without losing what made it satisfying in the first place.
Rachel Sikkema is a New Zealand-based writer and creative entrepreneur who explores the intersection of film, culture, and modern relationships. Through her articles, she examines how stories shape the way we connect, love and see ourselves. When she’s not writing about film and television, she’s watching Dexter and The White Lotus for the third time.