Love Wake Up Dead Man? Check Out These 10 Great Murder Mystery Movies Next.

Multiple films on this list were adapted from stage plays, but the fact that they feel similar in vibe to the Knives Out series only further points out what makes Johnson’s films special. In Rope, two close male friends kill a former classmate before hosting a dinner party to see if they can pull off the “perfect murder.” The only real obstacle is their assured, capable former teacher, played by James Stewart, who has to detect and unspool the killers’s plot in real time (director Alfred Hitchcock experimented with long takes stitched together to make Rope appear as one unbroken shot). Stewart’s regional American accent and the careful, sly way he interrogates the mystery calls to mind Benoit Blanc, and the combination of vivid Technicolor colors and the intricate mechanics of the murder plot put this classic thriller in close conversation with Johnson’s whodunnits—even though we know the culprit from the first scene.

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The first Pink Panther sequel was an adaptation of an unrelated Broadway play, heavily reworked to include Peter Sellers’s incompetent French police inspector Jaques Clouseau (who, like Benoit Blanc and many iconic Poirot performances, is played by an Englishman doing big accent choices.) The sly, winking treatment of a murder in a millionaire’s mansion filled with unfaithful spouses and arrogant suspects, as well as the frequent comic interruptions to the detective work, all feel very Knives Out-esque – even though, in this case, we can blame the entirety of the farce on our hapless investigator rather than buffoonish suspects, as Clouseau keeps shifting blame away from the most obvious suspect because he’s in love with her. The actually clever mystery intrigue is reserved for the opening and closing five minutes of the film, but stay tuned for the very amusing incompetence in between.

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The best thing about murder mysteries that feature a murder mystery writer as a character–like Knives Out and Sleuth–is that they act like they know they’re in a story, and are armed with a brilliant range of tips and tools to wriggle their way out of it. This ‘70s two-hander has all the trappings of a full-scale Agatha Christie movie–a big country manor, tons of creepy themed antiques, outsized jealous personalities, a devious love of tricks and games–but there are only two characters: mystery writer Andrew Wyke (Laurence Olivier) and Milo Tindle (Michael Caine). Milo wants to marry Andrew’s wife, and the older man invites his romantic rival to his empty house where they agree that Milo should steal his valuable jewelery for Andrew to claim the insurance. But both men have deception and humiliation on their mind, and run circles around their opponent with nothing holding them back. Writer Anthony Shaffer (The Wicker Man) layers devilish class satire and complex mystery plots into a battle of wits that would amuse and impress even Benoit Blanc.

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Playful, cutthroat, horny, and a bit demented, The Last of Sheila is a throwback to the most catty of classic whodunnits. Shot in the picturesque south of France and taking place primarily on an expensive yacht, this murder mystery feels as close to a definitive inspiration for the macabre but heightened tonal blend that Johnson adopted for Knives Out. Still, there’s a nasty anxiety in The Last of Sheila that still hasn’t been replicated since, as six friends who work in or around Hollywood play elaborate scavenger games devised by a wealthy widower on the anniversary of his wife’s death. The game starts to feel more personal and dangerous, and when more deaths occur, the makeshift detectives stumble onto a paranoid conspiracy. Written, of all people, by Stepjen Sondheim and Anthony Perkins, the neuroses of the entertainment industry become self-loathing satire; The Last of Sheila is a canny and vivid ‘70s mystery about the danger of secrets, steeped in irony and venom.

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The only direct Agatha Christie adaptation on this list, the sunny island setting and obnoxious personalities of Evil Under the Sun feel like a massive influence on Glass Onion. (Don’t take our word for it–you can catch Evil Under the Sun and other Knives Out adjacent whodunnits at the Netflix-owned and curated Paris Theater in New York City later this month.) Hercule Poirot (played by polymath Peter Ustinov) is on a gorgeous, fictional island in the Adriatic sea investigating a stolen diamond when an actress is found strangled on a beach. Thus begins the classic Christie gambit: questioning each larger-than-life suspect until the truth emerges, in its impossible and ungraspable glory, all thanks to the Belgian detective’s genius. This Christie film was less well received than its immediate predecessors, but the terrific cast and nasty streak of humor makes this case an utter joy to watch.

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Michael Caine must have loved making his last comic thriller (based on a play) about a mystery writer who plans to kill a younger competitor, because he made another one ten years after Sleuth– and this time he plays the jealous older writer. Like Sleuth, Deathtrap sets up its ruse in the first act–Caine is a washed-up playwright who invites a talented protege (a never better Christopher Reeve) to his house in the Hamptons, but his nervous wife (Dyan Cannon) fears he will kill for the student’s exquisite mystery manuscript. From there, we’re plunged into a succession of escalating rug pulls that would make Rian Johnson blush–you can sense the DNA of the Knives Out series not just in Deathtrap’s keenness to up the stakes, but its garish sense of morbid humor that pervades until the final frame.

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Basically 90 minutes of impeccable nonsense, Clue is to date the best “board game adaptation” film because it locates the Agatha Christie pastiche baked into the DNA of the game and heightens it into farce. You can thank comedy legends like Tim Curry, Madeline Kahn, and Christopher Lloyd for making Clue so funny–in giving life to the board game’s whodunnit archetypes, director Jonathan Lynn made sure to underline how stock, ridiculous, and recognizable the components of Christie mysteries were, setting the comedians up to blend murder, scandal, slapstick, and bawdy comedy with ease. The original release was not a financial success, and each screening featured one of three different endings to hoodwink audiences who would try to discuss the movie with other viewers. The home video release includes all three endings one after another, which makes for a much funnier experience, underlining how frivolous the whole whodunnit genre can get.

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Before Gosford Park, Robert Altman had been gathering massive ensemble casts, making them talk over one another, and somehow creating sharp, funny, and moving masterpieces for thirty years. Set at an English country house over an elaborate shooting weekend, Altman flits between the self-serving, pathetic quibbles of the English aristocrats–desperate for cash from the manor’s patriarch, sniffing at the arrival of a Hollywood producer and famous actor Ivor Novello–while a fleet of butlers, maids, and valets gossip and keep out of sight in the cellars. Of course, there’s a shocking murder, but Gosford Park’s genius is spending the first half of the film embedded in the catty, cruel social dynamics to the point that the ghastly crime feels like a macabre but honest and inevitable expression of the inequalities of the country home. Far more low-key than the theatrics of Knives Out, but a rich and rewarding watch from an American master.

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Guy Ritchie’s period adventure romp may appear at first glance the complete opposite of Knives Out. Johnson’s film honored the detective fiction tradition by homaging its clearest, most recognizable traits: a country manor, a squabbling rich family, an eccentric detective, lots of talking and flashbacks. Ritchie, however, turned Sherlock Holmes into an action hero who uses deductive reasoning to do slo-mo Matrix fight scenes–and it worked like gangbusters. Like Johnson’s films, there’s a real energy to the adventure, a roaring engine that lights up every raised eyebrow and pocket of exasperated bickering between the detectives–there’s shades of Robert Downey Jr’s Holmes and Jude Law’s Watson in Daniel Craig and Josh O’Connor’s chemistry in Wake Up Dead Man. If Knives Out made classic detective fiction feel as exciting as a blockbuster, Sherlock Holmes was the robust, satisfying warm-up act.

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A few years before Adam Brody side-stepped back into the spotlight with his Netflix series Nobody Wants This, he lent his dry, sharp comedic chops to a small-town detective story that, admittedly, feels more similar to Rian Johnson’s high school noir debut Brick than the lavish and ambitious Knives Out. But coming out less than a year after the first Benoit Blanc mystery (and greeted with a much, much more muted reception), there was a real hunger for sly, sardonic detective movies, and this film about a former wunderkind private eye who is now in his 30s with a case of gifted kid syndrome hits the spot. Brody is a perfect anti-Benoit Blanc, basically a loser who is humored rather than taken seriously, but like Knives Out, the comedy doesn’t get in the way of a robust, surprising, and dark mystery–making The Kid Detective the complete package.

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