Wake Up Dead Man Unmasked: Who Really Killed Wicks—and Why the Diamond Vanishes

Benoit Blanc swaps luxe getaways for pews and parish halls in Wake Up Dead Man, the third Knives Out film and a standalone follow-up to Glass Onion, as Daniel Craig’s sleuth digs into secrets at Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude, a rural upstate parish led by Josh Brolin’s Monsignor Jefferson Wicks.

So, Wake Up Dead Man doesn’t just bring Benoit Blanc back — it swings him straight into an upstate New York parish with knives, sermons, a fake miracle, and one very cursed diamond. It’s a lot. Let’s walk through who did what, why it spins out the way it does, and where that shiny troublemaker actually ends up.

Spoilers ahead for Wake Up Dead Man.

The setup: church, blood, and a locked closet

Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc lands in a rural parish called Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude, run by Josh Brolin’s Monsignor Jefferson Wicks. During a Good Friday service, Wicks ends up "stabbed" in a church closet that no one should’ve been able to access, which immediately paints Josh O’Connor’s assistant pastor, Father Jud Duplenticy, as the obvious suspect. He and Wicks had clashed over Wicks’s fire-and-brimstone style, which Jud said was driving the faithful away.

Blanc starts tugging on threads and finds something older and uglier under the vestments: a legendary diamond called Eve’s Apple, once owned by Wicks’s grandfather, Reverend Prentice Wicks. The stone is the fuse on everything that follows.

The real architect: Martha Delacroix

Glenn Close’s Martha Delacroix — longtime church helper, Prentice’s former student, and Wicks’s right hand — is the mind behind the madness. The story points fingers at everyone (especially Jud, who hears Wicks fall and is right there), but the plan is bigger, colder, and very premeditated. Martha is the only person who truly knows what Eve’s Apple is and where it’s hidden, and when she realizes Wicks is about to take it for himself, she decides to stop him for good.

Near the end, Blanc has one of those classic pauses where he decides not to perform the big drawing-room accusation. Instead, after the crowd disperses, Martha comes back to the church, where Blanc, Jud, and the Sheriff are waiting. She confesses — quietly, directly — to Jud.

How the murder actually worked

• Martha cozies up to Jeremy Renner’s Dr. Nat Sharp, a lonely, depressed physician whose wife left him. He becomes her crucial accomplice.
• She doses Wicks’s hip flask with pentobarbital. He swigs from it during service like always, and it knocks him out at the worst possible moment.
• Because she handles Wicks’s vestments, Martha pins a devil’s head trinket — the one Jud had swiped earlier from the pub — onto the priest’s shawl. It’s rigged with blood.
• When Wicks collapses, Nat triggers a remote to release the blood. Jud rushes in, sees what looks like a stabbing, and panics. That "stab" is all theatrics.
• Later, as the doctor on scene, Nat "examines" Wicks and actually stabs him, then removes the other matching devil’s-head piece attached to the shawl to clean up the trick.
• At the funeral, they rope in Samson, the groundskeeper. He hides in the coffin, while Wicks’s real body gets moved to Nat’s house.
• They attempt a staged resurrection: Nat dresses as Samson on camera; Samson dresses as Wicks and steps out of the tomb to sell the miracle. Jud clocks the switch, things go sideways, and Samson ends up dead.
• Eve’s Apple has been sitting in Prentice Wicks’s tomb the whole time. Martha wants Samson to retrieve it during the "miracle," both to secure the diamond and to jump-start the parish’s faith.
• Nat sees the diamond and makes a play. He murders Samson, frames Jud (wrong time, wrong place), and then decides Martha’s next.
• Martha flips Nat’s poisoned coffee on him, dissolves his body in a tub of acid (grim little detail), and arranges Wicks’s body to look like Nat killed him.
• Before anyone can arrest her at the end, Martha has already taken poison. She collapses in Jud’s arms with the diamond in her hand.

Why Martha does it (and how Eve’s Apple poisons everyone)

The mess starts a generation back. Reverend Prentice’s daughter — Grace, who is also Wicks’s mother — didn’t believe in the Church. He kept her tethered with the promise of a fortune after he died. Instead, in a move that’s both punitive and theatrical, Prentice literally swallows the diamond. Grace tears the place apart looking for the inheritance that never comes; the lesson is supposed to push her back to Christ. Subtle, he was not.

Martha knows the diamond’s truth and hiding place, and at one point confesses this to Wicks in a bid to unburden herself. Wicks, who the film paints as both hypocritical and ambitious, decides to take Eve’s Apple with help from his secret son, Cy. Cy’s angle is blunt: use the money to launch Wicks into politics, which means shedding the small flock currently propping him up.

Martha sees all of that for what it is — a plan to weaponize the diamond and the parish — and decides to stop it. Her idea isn’t just to remove Wicks; it’s to stage a short, sharp miracle to reignite faith and then keep Eve’s Apple from corrupting anyone else. Nat’s betrayal and Samson’s death blow it apart, but Martha never loses sight of the endgame: protect the secret of Eve’s Apple and keep the parish from turning into a sideshow.

Cy Draven’s revelation, and why it doesn’t help him

Cy Draven is the adopted son of Vera, who was forced by her father to raise him. She believed Cy was her illegitimate brother; the truth is nastier. She later learns Cy is actually Wicks’s illegitimate son and plans to expose him. Once Cy learns who his father is, he pivots fast: great, let’s use Dad to grease a political career. The snag? Wicks never tells him about the diamond, and then Martha kills Wicks. Cy spends the rest of the movie hunting Eve’s Apple and comes up empty.

Where the diamond ends up

After Martha’s confession and death, the diamond literally drops from her hand. Jud picks it up and hides it. Blanc sees what Jud is doing and, in a very Blanc way, lets it ride rather than blowing everything up again.

Cut to a year later. Jud reopens the parish under a new name, Our Lady of Perpetual Grace. He’s built a wooden crucifix himself, and Eve’s Apple is concealed inside it. He won’t cash it in, he won’t hand it to Cy (who insists he should inherit everything), and when Cy threatens to sue Jud, Blanc, and the church for the diamond, everyone shrugs and says they don’t know anything about it.

The net effect: whatever Wicks hoped to build dies with him, and the community moves forward without a rock dictating their souls.

The body count, cleanly

Just to line it up: Wicks goes down first, Samson is killed during the failed "miracle," Dr. Nat pays for his double-cross, and Martha takes her own life before anyone can take her in. It’s a bleak tally, but the film frames it as a series of moral reckonings orbiting one shiny object.

What did you make of that ending — righteous, tragic, both? Drop your thoughts below.

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Mystery is now streaming on Netflix.