Constellations

I watched Wake Up Dead Man over the holidays, and boy howdy did I love it. Like the previous movies in what we can now reasonably call a franchise, Wake Up Dead Man uses murder mystery framing to tell another story that runs alongside and through the murder plot. That story is about faith, what it actually is, what we’re often told it is in America, and how stories shape individual and collective identity. (For more on this, see this excellent Reactor article--though be warned, spoilers abound.) I love what Father Jud says about storytelling when he and Benoit Blanc meet for the first time, about stories being a pathway to truth inaccessible any other way. This is a definition of myth, one that I find personally resonant.

One of the tricky things about myth and story is the way they thread themselves through our identities and senses of self without our conscious awareness. Many of them we grow up with, and even if we consciously reject them afterward, that very conscious rejection is a kind of engagement. I felt some kind of way watching Wake Up Dead Man, because even though people with more currency in the Church than I have pointed out a few ways the movie gets Catholicism wrong, it gets enough right to bring me right back to Sunday school lessons 40 years ago.

And it’s the most important things that it gets right, anyway. The importance of grace, of remorse and repentance to redemption, and that kindness and compassion are neither weak nor passive—all of these are present in the character and actions of Father Jud, and are the best of what I remember from my own religious upbringing. There are principles I can’t help but live by, even though I haven’t considered myself a Christian for over 35 years.

These things aren’t just present in Father Jud, either. The movie spends its initial run time with him because the audience hasn’t met him yet, while those who’ve seen Knives Out and Glass Onion are already familiar with Benoit Blanc. I found Josh O’Connor’s performance and Father Jud’s predicament so compelling that I’d all but forgotten this was a Benoit Blanc mystery when he showed up at a miraculously convenient time. The movie is careful to make the atheist and the man of faith equally concerned with the truth, and then goes on to demonstrate—despite the ongoing argument between the two that eventually reaches mutual understanding—that they aren’t really in conflict. That’s almost a radical statement in 2025 America.

It's also in marked contrast to almost everyone else in the movie. Monsignor Wicks’s congregation—the ones who stick around, at any rate—are all in on his model of faith, and it’s a testament to the people of Chimney Rock (is Rian Johnson also a Choose Your Own Adventure fan, I wonder?) that most of them aren’t willing to put up with it. The ones who do stay have their reasons, and the irony is that every single one of them could find richer and truer fulfillment elsewhere. A few of them at least know that they’ve bought into something nefarious, but…sunk cost is a hell of a drug.

It's not just that, though. The stories we tell ourselves, and tell about ourselves, can divert from the truth rather than leading to it, and that’s just what the story at the heart (as it were) of Wake Up Dead Man does. It’s not even like the classic film Rashomon, where what happened depends on who’s telling the story. Here, it depends so much on what certain people want to be true that they’re willing to kill for it.

The thing about living a lie is that you have to keep lying, and maybe even convince yourself that it’s the truth. That’s the cost, and even Father Jud isn’t exempt from it.

Watching the scene in which Father Jud and Benoit Blanc finally meet, it’s remarkable how, even though Jud is at that very moment in spiritual crisis, he greets Blanc’s presence with curiosity. Their entire initial exchange consists of Jud asking questions and Blanc answering them. It’s a bit of role reversal, really, and toward the end of their conversation Jud says it himself: whether a story leads to a lie, or to “a truth so profound that it can’t be expressed in any other way.” No accident that the sun comes out at that moment, lighting up both Jud’s and Benoit’s faces.

The definition of a sunk cost is that you can’t get it back. But you can stop paying.

(Crossposted from Well-Tempered Writer. You can comment here or there.)