“This is dressed as a miracle, but it’s just a murder. And I solve murders.” So declares Benoit Blanc in Wake Up Dead Man, the third installment of Rian Johnson’s Knives Out series. His words, about the mysterious death of a fire-and-brimstone Roman Catholic priest, seem to set the stakes for the film: a battle between rationality and superstition, with the enlightened detective the inevitable victor. 

Blanc’s words express a fundamental rule of detective fiction: every crime must have a natural explanation which can be uncovered by careful reasoning.