Two years after literally burning the legacy of the past in his controversialStar Wars: The Last Jedi(my take? It’s the bestStar Wars. No further questions), celebrated filmmakerRian Johnsonis returning to theatres with an enjoyably throwback, aggressively entertaining film. Yes,Knives Outis still interested in dissecting the mechanics of the mystery genre, just asThe Last JedidissectedStar WarsandBrickdissected film noir. ButKnives Out, which drops in theatres June 26, 2025, is likely Johnson’s most purely pleasing picture, suffused with a sense of gleeful love for the genre.
Johnson loves the closed-room whodunit, a genre with literary roots in which a group of suspects are locked in a single location, a murder occurs, and it’s up to the detective (and reader) to deduce which member of the suspicious party is truly guilty. These types of mysteries serve as impressive showpieces for their writers, with their mastery of plot, character, and hidden information serving as the star. Plus, they invite the reader/viewer into their world more effectively than nearly any other genre. It’s just so much fun to align yourself with some of the world’s greatest detectives, solving the case alongside them. In celebration of this authorial mastery and reader/viewer synergy, I’ve compiled a list of some of the best closed-room murder mysteries ever made for the screen. If you have a great time atKnives Out, stumble upon your aunt’sAgatha Christienovels during Thanksgiving, and demand more – this is a great filmic place to start.
And Then There Were None (1945)
Before I wholeheartedly recommend the 1945 film adaptation of seminal Agatha Christie novelAnd Then There Were None, I must unpack its problematic origins as a fair warning. The original title of Christie’s work, based on a gross and racist minstrel-era song, is very, very, very bad, centering around a racial epithet. The work was then named a separately very, very, very bad title based on an adapted version of the same song. The song, the second version of which is recounted in the film, is a key plot point to Christie’s work, as each verse contains a clue for how the next person will be killed. So even though the title was changed for the film and subsequent republishings of the book, it still has problematic genes embedded into its DNA. However, if you are able and willing to reckon with the casual racism at its core (a reckoning one must do when engaging with many films of the past, asDisney+ is trying to get ahead of),René Clair’sAnd Then There Were Nonedoes serve as a textbook of sorts for filmed closed-room murder mysteries.
Eight strangers join two servants at an isolated island, all of whom are unsure of why they were invited. In lieu of a traditional, visible “host,” a record is played with a recording of a voice accusing each of them of murder. As the guests learn they are stuck on the island, they must reckon with their accusations – as they start dying mysteriously, one by one, they must play group-detective and figure out who’s responsible for all of these deaths. There tend to be two types of closed-room murder mysteries – one in which a detective is at the center, and one in which ordinary folks must rise to the occasion.And Then There Were Noneis maybe the filmed definer of the latter – even though, as you’ll learn, these folks are anything but ordinary.
The Last of Sheila
Did you know thatStephen Sondheim, the genius musical theatre composer/lyricist responsible for masterpieces likeSweeney ToddandCompany, co-wrote the screenplay for a New Hollywood take on the closed-room murder mystery in 1973? And would it surprise you to learn it’s friggin’ great? Of course not. It’s annoying, this guy’s genius. Sondheim’s screenplay, co-written with an equally bizarre screenwriterAnthony Perkins(you know, Norman Bates from goddamnPsycho), is based on their real-life penchant for arranging elaborate scavenger hunt murder mysteries for their Hollywood friends. Except in the film’s case – the clues and crimes are all real. Aboard a one-week Mediterranean cruise, a group of friends who all work in the film industry reunite in an attempt to enjoy each other’s company after an accident took producer Clinton Greene’s (James Coburn) wife’s life a year earlier. While the film’s beginnings may remind you ofThe Big Chillwith a looser, 1970s-chic flair, once the genre screws start turning, they don’t stop. You see, Clinton has a game to play with his guests, involving a collection of “secrets” he claims to be innocent fun, but in actuality are life-damaging admittances of trauma and guilt. When the game results in another death, the remaining cruise passengers must find out who among them is a murderer, whose secret has the most need to be kept, and who really was responsible Sheila’s death one year ago. Unlike many of the mannered films on this list, directorHerbert Ross(The Owl and the Pussycat) shootsThe Last of Sheilawith casual, freewheeling, dirty compositions. Everything feels captured, found, spied on without its participants’ permissions – thus, when its more suspenseful set pieces begin to unravel, so too will your nerves.
Murder on the Orient Express (1974)
Agatha Christie belongs on the Mount Rushmore of mystery, and her impeccable creation Hercule Poirot belongs on the Mount Rushmore of detectives. Introduced in Christie’s 1920 novelThe Mysterious Affair at Styles, Poirot is an eccentric Belgian detective with a helluva mustache and a peculiar set of fastidious impulses. IfWes AndersondirectedColumbo, it might give you something like Poirot – were it not for the fact that Poirot likely influenced both of those things.
After Christie’s creation captured the imagination of the world, Poirot was played in various radio, stage, and screen adaptations by actors likeCharles Laughton,Tony Randall, andOrson Welles. But in 1974,Albert Finneyplayed him on the big screen in what might be the most iconic take on the detective – and he got Oscar-nominated for his troubles, too. Finney donned the ‘stache inSidney Lumet’s lavish adaptation ofMurder on the Orient Express, a genre benchmark set entirely on a train. At this point, Lumet was primarily known for gritty, realistic works like12 Angry MenandSerpico. It’s a downright joy to see the versatile director take on “Technicolor star-studded epic” and absolutely crush it.Murder on the Orient Expressis just a damn fun watch – I particularly enjoy watching Finney deduce the meaning of clues to the strains ofRichard Rodney Bennett’s melodramatic score. And what of the 2017Kenneth Branagh-directed/starring remake? While it doesn’t reach the pure, classical heights of the ‘74 version, it is still worth your time. It features a litany of wonderful actors giving wonderfully grounded performances, it has some dope cinematography fromHaris Zambarloukos, and in perhaps the best cinematic moment of the 2010s, it features a character delivering a wild scissor kick that is never again addressed.
Garde à Vue
Most closed-room murder mysteries have a crew of reasonable suspects with a litany of motives and opportunities a detective must parse through, before deciding on the one suspect who truly did the deed.Garde à Vue, a 1981 French film from eclectic directorClaude Miller, experimentally and successfully filters the genre down to just one suspect. Jerome Martinaud (Michel Serrault) is a wealthy, powerful attorney accused of raping and murdering two young girls on New Year’s Eve. While the rest of Paris celebrates the new year, Jerome is stuck in an interrogation room being hounded by Inspectors Antoine Gallien and Marcel Belmont (Lino VenturaandGuy Marchand). These two chip away at Jerome’s obstinance, trying to discover the truth and get their perp to confess.
This tight-yet-slowly-paced thriller is still, by definition, a “whodunit.” It’s just that the “who” comes from a limited sample size. The intoxicating drama, thus, comes less from figuring out the key to cracking the case, but the key to cracking the person. But don’t get me wrong – this ain’t a purely experimental French art film. It’s still satisfyingly twisted and entertaining. If your access point for detective screen stories comes primarily from television procedurals likeLaw & Order,Garde à Vuewill likely serve as a keen film entry point for you, as its formal immediacy and exacting detail into the process of interrogations feel in dialogue with its small-screen cousins. And if you wind up digging the chamber drama ofGarde à Vue, check outCriminalon Netflix, a multi-country television series also locked off to an interrogation room. Just don’t watch the 2000 remake ofGarde à Vue,Under Suspicion. It may boast recognizable star power (Gene Hackman,Morgan Freeman,Monica Bellucci,Thomas Jane), but it’s frustratingly stylized and sanitized.
Whodunits and farces share a lot of DNA, despite their missions to elicit different responses from their consumers. Both involve a crew of dysfunctional people hampered by their foibles. Both involve labyrinthine plots and character decisions that knock over aRube Goldberg-esque set of unpredictable circumstances. And both tend to have a voice of reason at the center, trying to make order out of chaos. In 1985, these two genres joined forces in a movie that had no right to be as successfully entertaining as it is:Clue. Yep, like the board game. And while its original release was met with tepid box office returns and puzzled critical response – particularly to its gimmick of shipping to theatres with one of three random endings – the wild genre-bending adaptation has since attained quite the cult following, and deservedly so.
Featuring an absolute murderer’s row (pun intended) of ‘80s comedic talent,Cluetakes the initial, whodunit-aping premise of the board game – The body of Mr. Boddy (Lee Ving), is found! It’s one of six color-coded suspects! – and sprints with it (adding in objective treasureTim Curryas a new butler character for good measure). Each actor imbues their character with a surprising amount of realism, which makes the pleasures of their over-the-top explosions (likeMadeline Kahn’s iconic “Flames!”) pop even harder. The plotting is tight and twisty, the motives for each suspect are pure genre fun, and the three different endings work well for different reasons – though the closest to a pure, literary “whodunit” is likely ending 3, featuring Mr. Green (Michael McKean) as a sudden voice of reason in a film that is mostly the insane-leading-the-insane. Also, one visual gag involving a singing telegram makes me cry laughing every time. More comedy mysteries, please!
In his 1997 low-budget masterpiece, directorVincenzo Natalibrought the closed-room murder mystery into the paranoid sci-fi horror space, with results both psychologically and viscerally terrifying. And when I use the definer “closed-room” to talk aboutCube, I mean it about as literally as possible. A group of strangers (are you sensing a pattern?) wake up in a damn cube. In this damn cube, with sleek, monochromatic walls, these strangers are threatened with mysterious traps and threats of death – and are given absolutely no other information. As the strangers attempt to work together, traveling their way through other, differently colored damn cubes, they get murdered in increasingly inventive, hard-to-watch ways as a result of their mistakes. Who the hell put them there? How the hell do they get out? Do any of these strangers know anything they’re not saying?
While theCubefranchise goes on to explain some of these questions explicitly, the original works the best for me as an existential locked-room mystery. Murders happen and a group of de facto detectives do their best to solve what’s going on, yes. But any sense of closure, of that pleasure zone that comes from solving a puzzle, becomes slowly quieted by Natali’s intentions as the film goes on. It’s an appropriately modern take on the genre. Gone were the days when folks needed clear-cut morals, good guys figuring out the truth, and bad guys getting punished in their detective stories. Hell, gone were the days when folks needed “detectives” in their detective stories. In its place, an unblinking, unknowing, delirium-inducing, impossibleCube.
Gosford Park
DirectorRobert Altmanhad made some classic, muckraking mysteries before, from the experimental noirThe Long Goodbyeto the satirical murder mysteryThe Player. But with 2001’sGosford Park, Altman dove headfirst into the locked-room subgenre of mystery – and said an awful lot about class relationships in the process. Boasting an Academy Award-winning screenplay fromJulian Fellowes(who went on to createDownton Abbey, inspired in part byGosford Park) and a stunning array of British talent, the film centers on a meeting of the 1930s English elite in a beautiful countryside estate. The goal? To wine, dine, and go pheasant hunting. Oh, and for one guest, to murder the wealthy patriarch of Gosford Park, Sir William McCordle (Michael Gambon). It’s up to eccentric Inspector Thompson (comedy legendStephen Fry) to interrogate the eccentric suspects, divided by the “above stairs” aristocratic class (with folks likeMaggie Smith,Kristin Scott Thomas, andBob Balaban) and the “below stairs” working class of servants (with folks likeHelen Mirren,Clive Owen, andEmily Watson).
Gosford Parkis a slow-moving film, one that requires you to sit forward in your seat and pay attention on both a narrative and formal level – Altman, in his typical fashion, frames his actors in sprawling wide shots and lets them chatter over each other in overlapping chunks of realistic dialogue, forcing active participation. It feels radically different from nearly every closed-room mystery you’ll ever see, but that’s what makes it such a worthy watch. If you may get yourself on its particular wavelength and go along for its timely ride (if you ain’t screaming “Eat the rich!” now, you will be after watching this),Gosford Parkwill hit you in a place you didn’t know you needed to be hit.
It’s important to remember how much of detective fiction is indebted to the world of pulp. While we often view our iconic detectives like Poirot or Sherlock Holmes as being avatars of highbrow quality, other famous detective fiction tropes have their roots in dime magazines, dashed off paperbacks, and scuzzy writers crafting scuzzy worlds for scuzzy readers. And hell, even the “highbrow” shit is still about nasty people committing nasty murders. This reminder of the genre’s inherent “low status” may give you permission to have as much fun as possible watching the pulpy-as-hellIdentity, a 2003 thriller from acclaimed genre-hopping filmmakerJames Mangold(Logan,Ford v Ferrari).
Identityis a fitting end to this broad overview of the film genre, as it’s a twisted, “Christopher Nolanon Mountain Dew” take on Christie’sAnd Then There Were None. During a dark and stormy night – happening, coincidentally, during the potential staying of an execution of a vicious killer – ten strangers (includingJohn Cusack,Ray Liotta, andAmanda Peetas “Paris Nevada,” which is really and truly her name) are forced to seek shelter in a seedy motel. Of course, a killer starts picking them off one by one, and the crew must play detective and figure out exactly what’s going on – and which among them is a lying, deadly killer.
For much of its runtime,Identityplays like a slick mixture of a classical whodunit with a contemporarily violent slasher, proving that Mangold can really just direct the hell out of any genre he wishes. But then, at the risk of language confirming any explicit spoilers,Michael Cooney’s screenplay takes a big ol’ swing of a plot twist. It’s beyond obvious, hearkening back to the classic Hollywood thriller days of “explaining criminal behavior with overly reductive pseudo-psychological theorizing” (see:Psycho). And I absolutely love it. It’s the perfect move to tie together the genre’s past adherence to pleasurable forms and tropes, and to blast forward into the future with looney acts of deadly courage.
