Wake Up Dead Man: Pain & Searching

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, the third installment in Rian Johnson’s popular Knives Out series, follows a new ensemble of characters drawn into a small-town mystery. Each character is pursuing something they hope will restore control or meaning in their lives. Among them is Simone Vivane (Cailee Spaeny), a former world-renowned cellist who has withdrawn from public performance after developing a chronic nerve pain condition. Simone pursuit is that of understanding, first through medicine, then through faith guided by Monsignor Wicks (Josh Brolin). 

Simone’s defining trait is her seeking. She moves through medicine and faith with the same question: Why is this happening, and what am I allowed to do? Without a clear explanation, pain and the uncertainty that accompanies it makes navigating everyday life increasingly difficult. By the time we meet her, her search has been a structuring force in her life.

Clinically, this experience is familiar. Patients with chronic pain often present not only with symptoms, but with an urgent need for a framework to understand limits, assign responsibility, and justify action. Simone’s turn toward faith is not irrational. When medicine cannot yet offer clarity, faith can provide rules, meaning, and belonging, structures that chronic pain erodes.

Alongside this search, internal scripts organize Simone’s behavior. They are unspoken, yet legible in her choices: Someone will have the answer. I cannot trust myself to find the way. These are reasonable conclusions in a system that consistently defers certainty to future expertise. We see them reinforced when she is disappointed by healthcare, and taken advantage of by Monsignor Wicks within the story. Simone’s strategy is to cautiously outsource her agency, a way of preserving function and dignity while uncertainty dominates.

Over time, these scripts narrow her world. Avoidance becomes routine, shaping daily life bit by bit. For Simone, this culminates in relinquishing her identity as a cellist. This is experiential avoidance in its most socially acceptable form: the quiet postponement of life until certainty arrives. Medicine often participates unintentionally, encouraging waiting for the next test, the next referral, the next explanation. Pain is interpreted as a call for caution, and caution becomes a rule.

What is lost in this waiting is the ability to live freely by our values. In Living Beyond Your Pain, an Acceptance and Commitment–based approach to chronic pain, this process is described as “values illness”: chosen values gradually give way to attempts to control or avoid pain. Flexibility, curiosity, and meaning are reorganized around symptom management. The struggle to control pain obscures the why of living, leaving life structured around what is safe rather than what matters.

Simone’s relationship to the cello embodies this shift. Leaving her career is a value suspended, held hostage by scripts she develops around pain. Pain becomes equated with harm, and avoidance comes to feel synonymous with responsibility. What might seem protective or prudent in isolation accumulates into months and years of deferred engagement with life.

The film’s closing movement captures the delicate balance between pain and participation. Simone does not receive a final answer. Instead, she reconnects with agency and choice. We see her playing the cello with her arm taped. She is visibly uncomfortable, yet fully engaged. Pain remains. What has changed is her relationship to permission: she no longer waits for medicine or faith to authorize her participation in what matters. Values re-enter her life not because pain has resolved, but because she has stopped requiring certainty in order to live alongside it.

Simone’s story offers both a caution and an invitation. Chronic pain care often centers on explanation, optimization, and sequencing: once I understand, once I control, then I can live. The subtle cost of this approach is that patients may delay engagement with what matters, waiting for certainty that may never arrive. This is not a call to abandon the search for explanation or management. Diagnostic clarity and treatment remain essential. Simone reminds us that alongside these efforts, patients also need space to pursue what matters in the present. Living in alignment with values, even under persistent pain, reclaims meaning, agency, and dignity.