Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery ending explained: What happened to Wicks? 

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery leaves with one of Rian Johnson’s most complex and layered finales, where Benoit Blanc ends up once more in a maze of manipulation, fake miracles, and deeply buried secrets.

The 2025 whodunit, which had its world premiere at TIFF and is now available on Netflix, tracks Blanc as he engages in one of the impossible cases, which is also a wink to the traditional locked-room puzzles that served as the film’s base.

The parish community of a small town in upstate New York serves as the setting for the film, whose central theme revolves around the unexpected death of the Godfather, Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin).

Besides the trouble of his strict rule over the congregation, the friction among the clergy resulting from the church staff's power struggles becomes the motive maze that at once makes the probe harder. As Blanc digs deep into the investigation of Wicks’s death, the case broadens to a web of lies that cover the past.

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What happens in Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery?

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (Image Via Netflix)

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery starts with Wicks being killed forcibly, and the most likely perpetrator is Reverend Jud Duplenticy, a younger clergyman whose hostile arrival in the parish, along with a violent past, turned him into an enemy of the Monsignor. Jud's arrest is followed by a local police force and a congregation that both believe in his guilt, but Blanc is skeptical.

The plot thickens with a scene that a witness describes as the impossible event: Wicks emerging from his mausoleum after death seems to be welcomed by Samson, the groundskeeper.

Jud runs to the location and receives a blow that renders him unconscious. After he regains consciousness, Samson is dead, and Jud's broken memory leads him to suspect himself in Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery.

Help was on hand in the form of a construction crew who came across a letter in which Wicks secretly instructed the opening of the mausoleum after his death. In addition, Blanc finds out that the murder instrument, the devil-shaped toy, was one of the two exact copies robbed by congregant Dr. Nat Sharp.

When Blanc and Jud pay a visit to Nat to confront him, they find Wicks’s body and Nat being dissolved in an acid bath. The riddle seems to unravel with ease: Nat killed Wicks, and the case is done. However, Blanc is aware that the truth is a lot different than that.

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Who killed Wicks in Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery and what else happened?

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery's final act reveals a private confession as the medium for the truth to come out. Martha Delacroix (Glenn Close) returns to the church to talk with Jud and reveals the past so long hidden that it was the cause of the crime.

Martha remembers witnessing Wicks’s grandfather eating a valuable diamond called Eve’s Apple so that no one could get the better of his daughter, Grace. Grace’s obsession with finding the gem led to the destruction of the church that took place ten years ago.

Upon Jud’s arrival at the parish, Martha thought that he was doubting her faithfulness to Wicks. In order to prove her loyalty, she let Wicks know the secret place of the diamond. That disclosure brought Wicks to mandate the secret opening of the mausoleum.

As a matter of fact, however, it didn’t take long for Wicks to spiral out of control and, threatening to discredit his congregation publicly, Martha decided to stop him by any means necessary. She gave Nat Sharp the instructions on how to kill Wicks. Samson accepted to be the dead one whom Wicks would resurrect to fool the Monsignor, a trick that would demonstrate the coming back of the dead one."

Martha was completely unaware that Nat would betray her because of his greed. Nat endeavored to do away with Eve’s Apple and kill Samson in the process so that he could have the diamond all to himself.

To implicate Jud, Nat also forged the scene where Samson was killed, and on top of that, he tried to kill Martha by poison, but she swapped the drinks, killing Nat instead. She put Nat’s body in the acid bath, which was discovered by Blanc and Jud.

Martha, in her confession, says that she has already taken the rest of the poison. When Blanc and Jud figure out her involvement, she is on her deathbed. Blanc, who had an inkling of the truth, lets her last confession be her goodbye to the world and her final attempt to atone.

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery finale is set one year later. Cy Draven is still on the lookout for the lost diamond, not knowing that Jud has stashed Eve’s Apple inside a newly restored crucifix in the church, thus bringing to an end without fanfare the cycle of destruction the diamond had ‍‌‍‍‌‍‌‍‍‌caused.

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Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery is currently available on Netflix.

Edited by Sakshi Singh