In the seventeenth chapter of John Dickson Carr’s mystery novel “The Three Coffins” (1935), the story pauses so that Dr. Gideon Fell, a brilliant sleuth, can deliver the “Locked-Room Lecture,” an elaboration of all the various methods by which a person might be found murdered in a “hermetically sealed chamber,” a room locked from the inside. It’s one of the most justly celebrated passages in the history of detective fiction, and Carr, engaging the possibilities and limitations of genre as his very subject, breaks the fourth wall with merry aplomb. “We’re in a detective story, and we don’t fool the reader by pretending we’re not,” Fell tells his audience. “Let’s not invent elaborate excuses to drag in a discussion of detective stories.” A surreal gesture with a rational impulse: that was Carr all over. He was the undisputed master of plotting and solving the impossible crime, the murder as magic trick, in which victims appear to have been killed by supernatural means.

I began reading Carr in my early teens, and I never stopped. Even among the great Golden Age detective novels, his work stands out for its cheeky humor, baroque invention, and macabre spirit. The director and screenwriter Rian Johnson has made no secret of his own fandom—he wrote an introduction for a recent re-release of the author’s novel “The Problem of the Wire Cage” (1939)—and although Agatha Christie is an obvious inspiration for Johnson’s “Knives Out” murder-mystery movies, Carr has always struck me as the more profound, if less acknowledged, influence. (As it happens, Christie and Carr were peers; she claimed he was the only detective novelist who could bamboozle even her.) Imagine my delight when, roughly halfway through “Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery,” Johnson laid his Carrs on the table. Confronted with an impossible crime of his own, Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), the private investigator who anchors the series, launches into a bullet-point summary of Dr. Fell’s famous lecture. Blanc even hauls out a paperback copy of “The Three Coffins,” albeit under its U.K. publication title, “The Hollow Man.”

Of all the details in Johnson’s enjoyably farfetched plot, the widespread availability of a British edition in an American setting is the only one I’d quibble with, but it’s clear why Johnson exercised some titular license: few men are hollower than the film’s designated villain and inevitable murder victim, Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin), who spews a gospel of hatred and fury at Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude, a handsome, underattended Catholic church in the fictional upstate New York town of Chimney Rock. From his pulpit, Wicks rains down selectively vituperative fire and brimstone, with an eye toward provoking walkouts from unsuspecting visitors—say, a gay couple or a single mom. Chief among his targets is his late mother, Grace (Annie Hamilton, seen in lurid flashbacks), a figure whose sexual notoriety has earned her the cruelly redundant nickname the Harlot Whore. When Wicks isn’t lashing out at his congregants, he tries to unite them, with fundamentalist fury, against the looming threat of an increasingly secular America. Donald Trump is never invoked in “Wake Up Dead Man,” but Wicks has undeniably built his own Trumpian cult of personality, and he holds the church’s most loyal parishioners in his sway.

They’re a pretty wretched lot. There’s a local doctor, Nat Sharp (Jeremy Renner), who has slipped into alcoholic despair since his wife left him, and Lee Ross (Andrew Scott), a best-selling author and self-professed recovering liberal, whose rightward drift has led him to write an unreadable book about Wicks’s life. Somewhat more sympathetic are Simone Vivane (Cailee Spaeny), a gifted cellist, sidelined by chronic pain, whose generous donations keep the church running, and Vera Draven (Kerry Washington), a high-strung attorney. The script’s most cynical creation is Vera’s adoptive son, Cy (Daryl McCormack), a soulless opportunist who, after failing to launch himself into Republican politics, is now aiming for social-media stardom. Wicks’s most devoted ally is Our Lady’s designated church lady, Martha Delacroix (an amusing Glenn Close), who knows where the proverbial bodies are buried. (Speaking of which: just outside the church is an enormous crypt that underscores the film’s Lazarusian title.)

Into this group comes an earnest ray of light: Father Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor), a junior priest—“young, dumb, and full of Christ,” in his own words—who has been sent to serve in Wicks’s church. Overflowing with grace and mercy, Jud yearns to embrace his parishioners in their human brokenness, without condemnation. Naturally, the monsignor immediately sees him as a threat and launches a vicious campaign of psychological warfare, repeatedly forcing Jud to hear his confessions—in which Wicks describes his masturbation habits in nauseating detail—and undercutting the younger priest’s authority at every opportunity. Jud, a former boxer with a checkered history, has vowed never (again) to throw a fist in anger, but Wicks’s bullying tactics tempt him to break it. They also make Jud the prime suspect when the monsignor is fatally stabbed in church, right after delivering his Good Friday homily, in an alcove located just out of the congregation’s view. Before long, Blanc arrives on the scene, bent on figuring out how Wicks could have been slain, mid-service, by a murderer who appears to have passed right through the church’s walls. Regrettably, no one terms the incident a Mass murder.

When the first “Knives Out” was released in theatres, in 2019, it felt like a Hollywood revival—and a sophisticated rewiring—of a lost narrative art. Here was an original country-house murder plot, constructed with enormous care and rigorous ingenuity. Johnson sharpened these throwback pleasures by pairing them with razor-sharp progressive politics: the film was a kind of Cinderella story, in which a kind, lowly heroine (Ana de Armas) teamed up with Blanc to solve the crime and ended up triumphing over her racist, classist, obscenely wealthy former employers. Johnson preserved the story’s structure in his next “Knives Out” mystery, “Glass Onion” (2022), again pairing Blanc with an upstanding foil (Janelle Monáe) and launching, this time, an attack on billionaires and tech bros everywhere. Even so, the joke was at least partly on the movie: by then, the growing “Knives Out” franchise had been acquired by Netflix, a move that put Johnson’s disruptor-culture satire in a rather different light. Like most Netflix films, “Glass Onion” received only a token theatrical release and never got the chance to become a major big-screen hit on the order of the first “Knives Out,” which grossed more than three hundred million dollars worldwide. (If the laughter hasn’t died in your throat yet, Netflix now seems poised to acquire Warner Bros., throwing the direction of one of the last major Hollywood studios and its future theatrical releases into doubt.)

“Wake Up Dead Man,” which arrives on Netflix this week, directs its political ire at the unholy alliance of Christianity and the political right; the intolerance, insularity, and rampant misogyny that have taken root in the church; and the terrifying speed with which the disgruntled clergymen of today can become the YouTube demagogues of tomorrow. In dropping this satirical payload, the movie does bear out a structural weakness in the “Knives Out” series: a nagging shortage of individual development among the supporting characters. With one or two exceptions, Wicks’s parishioners feel little more than decorative; there’s no real sense of suspicion mounting and falling on each one of them in turn. Most are snide and strident, petty and self-serving, and their bickersome denunciations turn monotonous in ways that suggest, at times, a less-than-generous deity in the director’s chair.

The characters’ stick-figure proportions feel all the more glaring next to the complexity and generosity of Jud, whose insistence on his innocence is clouded by the shadow of his guilty past. Nonetheless, Blanc, knowing a good man when he sees one, enlists Jud’s help in solving the murder, setting in motion a predictable but enjoyable theological debate. Blanc, a strict skeptic and a gay man, has no use for Catholic dogma, but even an atheist would be moved by Jud’s humility, and by the genuine sweetness and sincerity of O’Connor’s performance. An astoundingly versatile talent (in “La Chimera,” “Challengers,” and this year’s “The Mastermind,” among others), O’Connor nails both Jud’s seriousness of spirit and the tendency toward good-natured, self-consciously vulnerable oversharing that, to judge by the prayer meetings and Bible studies of my own churchgoing youth, every eager young minister must possess. When Jud is interrupted, mid-investigation, by a woman’s heartfelt request for prayer, he treats the plea—and so, to its credit, does the movie—as a chastening reminder of first principles. Whether his name is cleared, Jud resolves, is immaterial. Come what may, he’s here to love and serve God’s people, as humbly and as radically as possible.

It’s no small thing for mainstream entertainment to make space for these contemplative gestures, especially during an action-heavy closing stretch that gets messier and more dementedly hair-raising by turns, unleashing nightmarish rivulets of rain, blood, poison, and acid, and culminating in what I’d call the opposite of an Easter miracle. But Johnson is saved, so to speak, by his refusal of condescension; he’s fastidiously committed to taking seriously the things that many others don’t, whether they be mysteries as a genre or mysteries of faith. For all the film’s wild swings between slapstick and snark, I can’t help but find myself mentally arranging a place for “Wake Up Dead Man” on the same shelf as the writings of G. K. Chesterton and Dorothy L. Sayers, both great crime writers and Christian apologists, and of P. D. James, an Anglican for whom the detective story was a powerfully moral exercise—a means of bringing order out of disorder. Carr, for his part, was a Presbyterian-raised agnostic, a hard-headed rationalist whose writing veered, on occasion, into the outright supernatural. He knew, as even Benoit Blanc suspects by the movie’s end, that not every impossibility can be explained. ♦