See How They Run begins with a complaint. Whodunnits are too predictable these days, says hotshot movie director Leo Köpernick (Adrien Brody). They all follow the same tropes, and no matter how many twists they throw at you, you can figure out the killer before the intrepid detective makes his deduction “You’ve seen one, you’ve seen ‘em all,” he drawls in resignation.
Today’s whodunnits beg to differ. As a recent slew of murder mystery films show, the genre is once again having its moment. But when true crime dominates our Netflix queues, is it any wonder that the world’s obsession with conspiracies, deceit and murder has carried into the fictional realm? Detective fiction had its golden age in the ‘20s and ’30s, as authors created stories about sharp-witted investigators solving crimes in (typically) aristocratic countryside homes. 100 years later, filmmakers are reconstructing the whodunnit as a distinctly modern art. Films like Knives Out and Bodies Bodies Bodies find stylistic or thematic embellishes to breathe new life into the intrigue, whether that’s rooting outdated premises in the present, or situating them in fresh environments – like the one-location, tailor shop-set thriller The Outfit.
Agatha Christie is, of course, foundational – but adapting her works won’t cut it anymore. You have to evolve. The fairly average Murder on the Orient Express and its lesser sequel Death on the Nile prove that you can’t just have enough twists to fill the Nile, you need to reinvent the formula. Kenneth Branagh's Christie adaptation may have come first but all credit is due to Knives Out for igniting the whodunnit explosion. Rian Johnson's clever, franchise-spawning mystery introduces enough originality to prevent Christie’s ideas from ever growing stale. In the film, the genre’s favoured locale – the old, extravagant mansion – is tied into questions of class and race. Who deserves wealth? And what if the killer isn’t the vengeful butler, but someone inside the house desperate to hold on to what they feel entitled to own?
As for See How They Run, the crime caper is a movie about a film adaptation of The Mousetrap play, which itself is based on a real-life crime – a metatextual puzzle that is fully aware of the genre it’s pulling from. Like most whodunnits, the characters are archetypal: the arrogant director and victim (Brody), whose tenuous relationships with his crew conjure various motives for murder; the sketchy producer (Reece Shearsmith); the pompous screenwriter (David Oyelowo); the greedy theatre owner (Ruth Wilson); and even the boisterous star (Harris Dickinson as a himbo-ish Richard Attenborough).
With a drunk detective (Sam Rockwell) and rookie constable (Saoirse Ronan) on the case, See How They Run constantly turns the mirror back on itself. In this whimsical, Wes Anderson-lite take on the murder mystery, the suspects are cognisant that they’re now in their own whodunnit. They poke fun at the jarring flashbacks, hackneyed cliches and explosive ending that the film itself uses, foreshadowing and referencing itself. By the end, it goes full Christie-pastiche by recreating the closing lines of The Mousetrap, as the audience is informed they’re “accomplices to murder” and must keep the killer a secret – the sort of 50s equivalent to a spoiler warning.
At the other side of the spectrum is Bodies Bodies Bodies, a film that puts the horrors of the genre in central focus. It doesn’t advertise itself as a whodunnit but contains all the markers of one (bar the intrepid detective). In an upstate New York mansion, a group of suspects are locked in by an approaching storm and the death of one of their own. As secrets unravel, mistrust is sewn into the group’s fraying relationships as they fumble in the dark, figuring out who would off their own friend. Bodies Bodies Bodies is elevated by its skewering of Gen Z – buzzword-filled in-fighting, class warfare, and TikTok dances imbue the mystery with a distinctly modern feel. It’s an acerbic, dark comedy that memefies the whodunnit.
With Daniel Craig's southern detective Benoit Blanc set to return imminently in the Knives Out sequel Glass Onion, the whodunnit boom is far from over. But it's no shock that the murder mystery continues to capture our fascination. They walk the line between crowd-pleasing fun and queasy horror, and it's a tantalising prospect to spend a few hours occupying that grey space. Agatha Christie may be the godmother of the whodunnit, but today's modern mysteries have revitalised the genre with a killer edge.
