“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. Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin proclaims in The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) that “all apparent impossibilities must be proved to be not such in reality.” Or, as Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes more famously and elegantly put it fifty years later in The Sign of Four (1890), “when you have eliminated the impossible whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” Ghosts, wizards, hellhounds, and, yes, miracles are not to be admitted into the detective story, unless they can be proven shams. The investigator clears away illusion and conjures truth in its place.

Rian Johnson knows these rules well. Throughout the Knives Out franchise, he has proven himself an astute reader of detective fiction, playing with familiar settings and tropes while gleefully subverting his viewers’ expectations. This latest installment even incorporates a church book club reading list of classic mysteries: Poe, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and, most notably, John Dickson Carr, whose locked-room puzzle The Hollow Man (1935) is referenced throughout the film. Each of these texts presents its murder as a complex puzzle to be solved, impossibilities to be eliminated, improbabilities to be proven true.

If all Wake Up Dead Man had to show us were this predictable act of disenchantment, it might still be an enjoyable two hours, but it would be a much worse film. Fortunately, this film goes deeper, not only offering a solution to the crime, but also illuminating the questions of faith and doubt that lie at the heart of the detective story. In spite of Holmes’s famous formula, by scrutinizing the human soul, these tales examine the relationship between justice and mercy, investigator and priest, detection and religion.

Wake Up Dead Man makes these questions explicit by selecting as its foil for Benoit Blanc’s skepticism the sympathetic figure of Father Jud Duplenticy, an eager young priest who becomes the prime suspect in the murder of his combative superior, Monsignor Jefferson Wicks. Wicks describes the world as a wolf, an enemy to be conquered in the name of Christ. Blanc, in less militaristic but equally confrontational terms, describes the investigation as a game to be won and longs for “that moment of checkmate, when I take the stage and unravel my opponent’s web.” But when we meet Father Jud, he declares that his role is not to fight the world but to follow Christ’s example by loving and seeking to heal it. Much of the film’s drama and poignancy comes from Father Jud’s struggle to fulfill that vocation, in spite of his own anger, the pressures of the investigation, and the provocations of bitter parishioners.

The conflict between the desire to fight the world and the aspiration to love it plays itself out through two tropes which the detective story shares with Christian theology: revelation and confession. For Christians, revelation refers to the unveiling, be it public or private, of sacred truth, and confession gives voice to inward penitence that seeks reconciliation with God. In detective fiction, the investigator interrogates suspects in hopes of eliciting either a confession of guilt or information that will lead to the final revelation of the culprit. The purpose is not transformation but exposure. The detective’s revelation of the criminal’s guilt may be an ethical necessity, essential to the pursuit of worldly justice and the protection of the community, but it is resolutely external. It has little to do with the transformation of the sinner’s soul.

The characters in Wake Up Dead Man are obsessed with the detective’s form of revelation – and not just as it pertains to the murder. Wannabe influencer Cy Draven is constantly filming, even during mass and private meetings, and he uses the footage to expose others. Following his example, Wicks threatens to reveal his parishioners’ weaknesses to the world (a violation, one might note, of the seal of confession). Meanwhile, Blanc presses forward to the longed-for moment when he can reveal the true nature of the crime and the identity of the murderer – and the audience goes with him. After all, we are watching this film because we enjoy that final revelation.

But the film questions our desire for this moment of exposure. Are we no better than the anonymous online audience eating up Cy Draven’s manipulative rants? Are detective stories truly about justice, or are they merely vehicles of vicarious excitement and self-satisfaction? In Talking About Detective Fiction, the great mystery novelist P. D. James describes the genre as granting “entry to a familiar and reassuring world in which we are both involved in violent death and yet remain personally inviolate both from responsibility and from its terrors.” Surely we ought to be suspicious of this spectatorship and its abdication of responsibility?

A similar conflict plays out in Wake Up Dead Man’s depiction of confession. The opening shots of the film portray Blanc reading a written confession by Father Jud outlining the events surrounding the murder. In the next scene, we see Father Jud apologizing to a disciplinary committee for punching a deacon. His first interaction with Monsignor Wicks ends with a very uncomfortable formal confession, wherein Wicks describes sexual sin in graphic detail to haze the newcomer – a performance that Wicks apparently repeats every week until his death. The events of the murder are likewise set in motion by a parishioner’s confession.

These self-disclosures are mostly not expressions of penitence or efforts to reveal the truth: rather, to varying degrees, they seek to manipulate their audiences – to conceal or deny guilt, to unsettle their auditors. They make us yearn for Blanc’s bracing skepticism, as he ruthlessly cuts through deception. Perhaps exposure is the only just course after all?

As Father Jud attempts to prove his innocence by joining Blanc’s investigation, however, he finds that this pursuit of the detective’s revelation is incompatible with his pastoral vocation. In the most moving scene of the film, just as he is about to uncover a pivotal clue, Father Jud is stopped in his tracks by a stranger in desperate need of love and healing. He steps away, shutting the door on both Blanc and the audience, to hear a lonely woman’s confession of grief and sin. Afterward, he tells Blanc that he is done with the investigation: he’s had “a road to Damascus thing,” the kind of “holy revelation” that led to Saint Paul’s conversion. He rejects the detective’s competitive pursuit of exposure, declaring that his purpose is not to “fight the wicked and bring them to justice, but to serve them and bring them to Christ.”

Christians are well-accustomed to Hollywood writers telling them the right way to practice their religion. Tolerance and love are acceptable; judgment and wrath are not. While Wake Up Dead Man conforms to this paradigm, what makes it remarkable is its portrayal of the potential influence of sincere belief.

Benoit Blanc begins the film a “proud heretic” and ends it still unwilling to attend mass, but he is nevertheless influenced by Father Jud’s example. In the film’s climactic moment of secular revelation, Blanc ascends the pulpit to lay bare the murderer’s “wickedness and shame” and to claim his “final checkmate over the mysteries of faith” – but he finds himself unable to follow through. Gazing into a sunlit church window, he has his own Damascus moment and realizes that he must abdicate his triumph to grant the guilty party the opportunity for true confession.

And true confession is what follows – the first true confession in the film. When Monsignor Wicks makes his aggressively offensive confessions (which are, not incidentally, later revealed to be fabricated), each encounter ends with Father Jud assigning a perfunctory penance. When the murderer at last comes forward, we see almost the whole Roman Catholic Rite of Reconciliation, ending with the priest’s words of absolution:

God, the Father of mercies, through the death and resurrection of his Son has reconciled the world to himself and sent the Holy Spirit among us for the forgiveness of sins; through the ministry of the Church may God give you pardon and peace, and I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

Here, the authentic spiritual experiences of revelation and confession transcend the detective’s strictly rational work. The truth is revealed, but more importantly, a soul is transformed.

If the film’s most overt influence is Carr’s The Hollow Man, its most important may be a text to which it alludes only in passing: G. K. Chesterton’s The Innocence of Father Brown (1911). The humble priest-detective doesn’t make it onto the book club list, though at one point Blanc does jokingly refer to Father Jud as “Father Brown.” Chesterton’s detective is characterized not so much by his undeniable knack for untangling bizarre crimes (acquired through years of taking confessions) as by his concern for the souls of those he encounters. His greatest triumph in The Innocence of Father Brown is not so much the solution of any particular puzzle as the conversion of a master thief into a law-abiding man. It is a task that taxes not only the mind of the detective but his heart and soul as well.

We are persistently reminded throughout the film of the significance of these stories to our everyday actions. Blanc, when he first walks into the church and expresses his discomfort with religion, is uncomfortable with its potential for narrative manipulation. When he describes the church architecture, he says, “It’s like someone has shone a story at me that I do not believe.” And we have already been primed to share his discomfort, watching as Monsignor Wicks radicalizes his parishioners with stories of wrath and judgment. Later, the reading list of murder mysteries becomes a blueprint for crime in the wrong hands, a crime that uses Wicks’s death to craft a new myth. But Father Jud challenges our suspicion, by asking Blanc, “Do these stories convince us of a lie, or do they resonate with something inside us that’s profoundly true?” Over and over, we are encouraged to consider if the stories we encounter are clever deceptions, intended to dazzle, or true sources of illumination.

Wake Up Dead Man takes its title from a U2 song of the same name and from a line of the prison work song “Ain’t No More Cane on the Brazos.” Both texts echo Christ’s promise to awake Lazarus from sleep and, more directly, Saint Paul’s words in the Epistle to the Ephesians: “Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.”

Ultimately, what the film suggests, and what Benoit Blanc learns from Father Jud, is that the pursuit of justice can be more than a game: it can be a call to new life. In setting aside the triumph of exposing the murderer, Blanc makes space for the individual revolution that lies at the heart of the Christian faith. He recognizes that he is more than a pure instrument of justice. In choosing to be a human concerned for the soul of another human, he forfeits the public triumph he craves. What was intended to be the story of Benoit Blanc’s triumph becomes Cy Draven’s embarrassing video, “Benoit Blanc pwned.” But in permitting this embarrassment, Blanc makes space for something more precious: he allows a sinner to confess. He becomes an instrument of Christ.

In spite – or perhaps because – of its discomfort with religion, Wake Up Dead Man extends the same invitation to us all. We too can set aside our desire to win in order to show mercy. We can purpose to serve and love the world, beginning with the most obnoxious of our neighbors. And however wicked and ashamed we feel, however righteous and prideful, we can still answer Christ’s call to bring our sin and guilt and pain into his light.