Josh O'Connor plays Rev. Jud Duplenticy, a former boxer turned Catholic priest who is sent to upstate New York after a heated clash with a rude deacon. He is assigned to Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude, a modest parish steered by Josh Brolin as Msgr. Jefferson Wicks. Wicks is the grandson of Rev. Prentice Wicks, who kept Jefferson’s mother Grace Wicks Annie Hamilton at the church with the promise of an inheritance; the supposed fortune vanishes after Prentice’s death, and Grace ransacks the church, destroying its crucifix, a move the younger Wicks refuses to repair. This tangled history sheds light on the tension between faith, money, and lineage that threads through Jud’s uneasy initiation at the parish.
Jud’s blunt, provocative sermons quickly polarize the congregation, leaving only a small core of loyal followers. On Good Friday, tragedy strikes when Wicks dies in a storage closet near the pulpit, stabbed with a knife fashioned from a devil’s head lamp the priest had once stolen from a bar and hurled through a church window. With Wicks dead, Jud becomes the prime suspect and the town’s attention converges on the church as investigations begin.
Police chief Geraldine Scott summons private detective Benoit Blanc to lead the inquiry, and Blanc recruits Jud to assist him, despite Scott’s objections, convinced of his innocence. After Wicks is laid to rest in Prentice’s mausoleum, Blanc and Jud question the congregation and uncover that Wicks had recently disavowed his followers at a provocative meeting. A dramatic claim from Cy Draven reveals that Wicks may have found Prentice’s fortune and is planning to use it to propel a political career, with Cy casting himself as his illegitimate son. Feeling pulled in too many directions, Jud steps away from the investigation to focus on his own ministry, at least for the moment.
As night falls on the rectory, Jud believes he witnesses Wicks leaving the mausoleum and embracing the groundskeeper Samson Holt [Thomas Haden Church]. When he pursues them, he is knocked unconscious and awakes beside Samson’s lifeless body. Blanc cautions Jud against surrendering himself, having noticed a second adornment missing from the bar, this time stolen by Nat Sharp [Jeremy Renner], a local doctor who is connected to Wicks’ circle. Blanc and Jud trace the evidence to Nat’s house, where Nat’s own corpse dissolves in a tub of acid alongside Wicks’ body, deepening the mystery surrounding the ritual cure and the fortune.
The next morning, the congregation gathers for Jud’s confession, but Blanc steps forward with a sharper explanation: Nat killed Wicks by spiking his private flask with tranquilizers and attaching a second adornment to Wicks’ vestment to misdirect Jud, then covertly switching the adornment and stabbing Wicks while pretending to inspect the body. Yet Blanc concedes that some pieces of the case—like the seeming resurrection of Wicks—remain puzzling, leaving the faithful restless and the room for doubt wide open.
Just when arrest seems imminent for Samson’s murder, Wicks’ former assistant Martha Delacroix [Glenn Close] returns, ready to confess. She reveals a deeper, earlier plot: Prentice swallowed a valuable diamond—the key to the church’s fortune—and Grace sought it in a desperate bid to escape the church. Martha’s revelations explain how Wicks planned to retrieve the gem from Prentice’s corpse, and how Nat and Samson were co-opted into staging Wicks’ resurrection to restore faith. To thwart this plan, Martha helped set in motion Nat’s murder of Samson and a plot to silence her, ultimately poisoning Nat with pentobarbital-laced coffee to protect herself. Blanc reads the final truth, allowing Martha to step forward in her own time; with her last breaths, she prays for forgiveness from all those harmed, including Grace, and Jud performs last rites as Martha dies, dropping the diamond in the process.
A year later, Jud prepares to reopen the church again under the new name Our Lady of Perpetual Grace. The former parishioners have largely moved on, and Cy, the presumed heir to Prentice’s fortune, threatens a lawsuit if the diamond is returned. Yet the community remains tight-lipped, choosing to pretend ignorance. As new parishioners enter for Jud’s first service, the diamond is revealed once more—secreted inside a new crucifix, a quiet talisman hinting that faith, money, and memory will continue to collide in this town.
The film also features a brief voice cameo by Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the Baseball Announcer, adding a fleeting note of whimsy to the unfolding drama.
