Jud Duplenticy

Jud is a boxer turned priest. After punching a fellow deacon, he is reassigned to Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude, an upstate New York parish. Monsignor Jefferson Wicks rules the church with furious sermons and has driven away nearly everyone except his most loyal and corrupt followers. Jud despises his style and threatens him in public. The day before the crime, drunk, he steals a bar fixture identical to the one used in the crime.

On Good Friday, Wicks collapses in a closet beside the altar with a lamp-finial knife in his back. Jud had threatened Wicks and stolen an identical finial the day before, so the police see him as the culprit. Detective Benoit Blanc arrives and believes him. Jud helps question the parishioners, hear their secrets. Tired, he quits the investigation, and at night he wakes up next to the groundskeeper's corpse.

Blanc explains how Nat Sharp killed Wicks with a decoy finial, sedatives and fake blood. Suddenly he stops: he says Jud's example led him to let the culprit come forward on her own. Martha, the parish secretary, confesses, and Jud absolves her. A year later, he has carved a new crucifix and is reopening the church under a new name, Our Lady of Perpetual Grace. The diamond everyone was hunting is hidden inside the crucifix.

Martha, the parish secretary, confesses everything. Father Prentice had converted his fortune into a diamond he called Eve's Apple. When he took his own life, he swallowed the stone. Wicks's mother, Grace, wrecked the church looking for it. Martha and Nat planned to kill Wicks before he could destroy the parish. Afterward, Martha had Samson entombed in Wicks's place to find and destroy Eve's Apple. Samson left the tomb dressed as Wicks, and Nat, dressed as Samson, killed him to keep the diamond.

Jud Duplenticy was created for Wake Up Dead Man (2025), Rian Johnson's third film with Benoit Blanc. Josh O'Connor plays him. Johnson says it's the hardest script he has ever written.