adevyish | Wake Up Dead Man (2025)

I watched this film in October and this post is based on the notes I wrote then. However I have not rewatched it, so some details may be misremembered.

So, genre conventions: even for a murder mystery Rian Johnson is quite heavy-handed with his symbolism in this film. It’s, I think, an intentional reflection of the heavy-handedness of biblical stories themselves: as this film builds an internal bibilical story (-ies) and an external one. The interplay of light is the most apparent one; a few framing halos got a chuckle out of the festival audience. However the obvious symbols, like a magic trick, serve as a distraction to give the more lingering — and important — themes their time to stew in the back of frame, back of mind before bringing them into stark, finished focus.

One of the these themes is the lack of agency given to women. We never find out what really happened with Grace, we only know her by the stories men tell.¹ We do not even know Cy’s mother’s name: she is a speck of misprint ink on the page of preacher begat preacher begat preacher. And: why is Martha around the church all the time as a child without her mother? Why did Nat’s wife leave him? The film is awash with nameless, motiveless women because the narrative — the men of the church — erases them.

And yet: the women of this church are also the only members who manage to show any interiority. When they realize they have no power parroting this system that pits them against each other and choose their own paths, they demonstrate a self-clarity that none of the men manage to do. The men remain yoked to this shrinking, ravenous beast that promises them power and gives them nothing they actually want. The original sin of The Story is woman’s temptation; the original sin of the story is men’s greed.

Claire Willett gets at why WUDM is such a good film about religion much, much better than I can, but at the core the idea is that the bible is just some stories and stories are about how you choose to interpret them and act on them. As a hater of, and raised in, small-e evangelicalism it’s nice to watch a movie that simultaneously rejects rigid church teachings, emphasizes that there can be good faith leaders, and keeps the main character a firm atheist. It’s a difficult needle to thread but Rian Johnson does it really, really well.

1. Including the one Martha tells: after all, it was told to her by a man.