Netflix dropped the first three episodes of Rian Johnson’s Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery on November 20, 2025, and the internet has officially lost its collective mind. Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc is back — older, sharper, and more gloriously eccentric than ever — in what early viewers are hailing as the streaming giant’s most audacious whodunnit yet. Within hours of release, #WakeUpDeadMan skyrocketed to the top global trend, racking up 4.2 million posts as fans screamed about a premiere so twisted it “ruined every other detective show forever.”

Set against the fog-shrouded cliffs of a remote Scottish island, the third Knives Out installment plunges Blanc into his darkest case. A tech billionaire (Andrew Scott) is found dead inside a locked panic room during a storm that cut the island off from the mainland. No footprints. No forced entry. Just a single playing card — the Queen of Spades — pinned to the corpse with a silver dagger. Cue ten suspects, each with secrets uglier than the last, trapped together in a gothic mansion that makes the Glass Onion look like a holiday Airbnb.

Daniel Craig, sporting a silver-streaked pompadour and a Southern drawl thicker than molasses, delivers what critics are already calling the performance of his post-Bond career. “Blanc has evolved,” Johnson told Vanity Fair. “He’s haunted now. The man who once solved murders for fun is starting to realise the cost.” Josh O’Connor, fresh off an Emmy-nominated turn in Challengers, plays the billionaire’s estranged prodigy son — a tech-bro Icarus with a heroin habit and a stare that could freeze whisky. But it’s Glenn Close who has stolen the internet’s soul. As the victim’s ice-queen mother, Lady Eleanor Whitmore, she delivers a monologue in episode one so venomous that viewers paused to tweet single-frame screenshots with captions like “MOTHER IS MOTHERING (evil edition).”

The chemistry between the trio crackles like a live wire. Close and Craig’s verbal fencing in a candlelit library has already spawned a thousand GIFs, while O’Connor’s breakdown during a storm-lashed confession scene left test audiences reportedly “sobbing and screaming at the same time.” Add supporting players like Cailee Spaeny as a TikTok-famous true-crime influencer, Josh Brolin as a disgraced ex-cop bodyguard, and Mila Kunis as the billionaire’s trophy wife with a PhD in astrophysics, and you have a cast that feels less like an ensemble and more like a powder keg with perfect cheekbones.

Johnson, directing from his own script, leans harder into horror than ever before. Wake Up Dead Man trades the sun-soaked satire of Glass Onion for something closer to And Then There Were None meets The Wailing. The first episode’s final five minutes — a single-take tracking shot through the mansion as every light dies and a child’s lullaby plays backwards — has been called “the most terrifying sequence Netflix has ever aired.”

Social media is in meltdown. “This isn’t a murder mystery, it’s a psychological autopsy,” one viewer posted alongside a clip of Close whispering “We all wake up dead men eventually.” Another declared, “Benoit Blanc just ended Sherlock, Luther, AND True Detective in one episode. I need therapy.” The show currently sits at 100% on Rotten Tomatoes from the first 28 reviews, with The Guardian calling it “the rare sequel that makes its predecessors look like warm-ups.”

With weekly drops confirmed through Christmas, Netflix has engineered the ultimate water-cooler event. Episode one ends on a cliffhanger so brutal — Blanc discovering a second body that “shouldn’t exist” — that viewers are already begging Johnson for mercy. If the remaining seven episodes maintain this velocity, Wake Up Dead Man won’t just be Netflix’s biggest hit of 2025; it might just redefine the entire genre.

Daniel Craig hanging up James Bond for Benoit Blanc forever? After this premiere, no one’s complaining.