(Credit: Netflix)

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery on Netflix is not an ordinary whodunit. It’s a case beyond belief that borrows heavily from two diverse sources: the literary history of murder mysteries and the Bible.

Rian Johnson paid close attention to planting clever Easter eggs throughout his latest Knives Out film, which sees the return of Benoit Blanc in a small parish in upstate New York.

For those yet to catch up on Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, currently streaming on Netflix, the third entry in the beloved detective film series revolves around a seemingly impossible crime, when corrupt Monsignor Jefferson Wicks is killed in a tiny closet inside his own church. The gripping case is in the DNA of a locked-door mystery, backed up predominantly by John Dickson Carr’s The Hollow Man, whose literary references are found one too many times.

While the crime is so complex that it even has Blanc, the Southern sleuth, sweating out, in addition to the Easter eggs Johnson already divulged on, a religious reference, the road to Damascus, becomes a crucial revelation for the detective. But the question that might still loom at large is: what is the exact significance of the road to Damascus in solving the crime of Wake Up Dead Man?

In a conversation with Netflix, Johnson enlisted the road to Damascus as the final Easter egg he planted in his Knives Out instalment. While walking through the woods, we hear Jud Duplenticy saying it out loud for the first time that he had a “Road to Damascus thing.” As it turns out, having grown up Christian, Johnson is actually pretty familiar with the concept.

St Paul was originally the persecutor of Christians and it was on the road to Damascus that he had his revelation that left him blinded. But finally, when he accepted almighty, it was like “scales fell from his eyes and he could see again.” As Johnson puts it, the concept has become a shorthand for “having kind of a holy revelation.”

This kind of realisation actually hits Jud in the middle of the movie where it dawns upon him that the cat-and-mouse chase he has been on, thanks to Blanc’s investigation, has diverged him from his purpose and the reason why he’s there. In a later sequence, Blanc is also seen reiterating the line inside the church, mirroring St Paul’s blinding vision on the road to Damascus, signifying a complete change in belief as he sees past mere clues to unpack the moral truths of faith, sin, and redemption.

The Biblical concept doesn’t just serve as a guiding light. For Blanc, it assists him to see beyond the manufactured puzzle to understand the spiritual legacy of the crime, giving him a clear blueprint of the characters’ motivations and ultimately how it all ties to faith and belief.