Mad Over Stories Team Rian Johnson’s Knives Out reminded everyone how much fun a proper whodunit can be: a great house, a worse family, a brilliant detective, and clues that actually add up. Part of the delight is how the film plays fair — it hands you the solution early and dares you to notice — and part is the sheer pleasure of watching a wealthy clan turn on each other the moment money enters the room. If you’ve watched it (and Glass Onion) twice and want more of that stylish, clever, slightly comic murder-mystery energy — the ensemble cast, the twisty structure, the wit that never sneers at the genre — these are the films to queue up next, grouped by the exact itch they scratch.
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The Modern Whodunits
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022) — The obvious next stop: Benoit Blanc on a tech-billionaire’s Greek island, skewering the exact kind of people who deserve it. Sharper and sillier than the first, and its central trick is arguably even bolder.
See How They Run (2022) — A meta 1950s London whodunit set backstage at an Agatha Christie play, with Sam Rockwell as a weary inspector and Saoirse Ronan as his over-eager constable. Knowing, playful, and unafraid to poke fun at the genre it loves.
A Haunting in Venice (2023) — Kenneth Branagh’s third Poirot outing is the best of his trilogy: a moodier, near-horror take drawn loosely from Christie’s Hallowe’en Party, set in a decaying palazzo during a séance. It trades the sun-drenched glamour of the earlier films for genuine unease, and it’s tighter and stranger for it.
The Ensemble Comedies of Murder
Clue (1985) — The board-game adaptation that flopped in cinemas and became a cult classic. Multiple endings, perfect comic timing, and the funniest cast a whodunit has ever assembled — Tim Curry’s manic butler alone is worth the price of admission.
Murder Mystery (2019) — Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston as a bickering couple who stumble into a locked-room killing aboard a billionaire’s yacht. It’s frothy rather than clever, but it hits the same “ordinary people in a glamorous murder plot” pleasure centre, and its Netflix ubiquity made it one of the platform’s biggest films.
Death on the Nile (2022) — Branagh’s lush Egyptian-set Poirot mystery is pure travelogue-glamour whodunit, a love triangle turned lethal aboard a paddle steamer. If Knives Out left you wanting beautiful people, exotic locations, and a detective who explains it all in the final reel, this delivers.
The Classics That Invented the Template
Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile — Kenneth Branagh’s lavish Poirot films are the closest thing to Knives Out‘s DNA, because they share its source: Agatha Christie, who wrote the rules everyone else follows. If the films leave you wanting the originals, that’s the point:
Murder on the Orient Express
The most famous whodunit ever written — a murder aboard a snowbound train and the only detective who can solve it. Read it before you think you remember the ending.
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And Then There Were None
Ten strangers, one island, a killer among them and no way off. The best-selling mystery of all time, and the blueprint for every 'trapped with a murderer' story since.
View on Amazon →The Country-House Mysteries
Gosford Park (2001) — Robert Altman’s upstairs-downstairs country-house mystery is where Julian Fellowes first tried out the world he’d later turn into Downton Abbey. Slower and sharper than Knives Out, and every bit as well-observed; the murder almost takes second place to the social anatomy of a 1930s English estate.
Ready or Not (2019) — Not a whodunit but a whydunit with the same wicked class satire: a bride discovers her new in-laws’ fortune comes with a lethal wedding-night tradition. If the appeal of Knives Out was watching a rich family reveal its rot, this is the horror-comedy cousin, funny and vicious in equal measure.
The Last of Sheila (1973) — A cult favourite co-written by Stephen Sondheim and Anthony Perkins, in which a movie producer invites six guests aboard a yacht for an elaborate scavenger-hunt game that turns deadly. Rian Johnson has openly cited it as an influence, and you can see its fingerprints all over the Knives Out films’ love of games within games.
The New-Wave Whodunits
Only Murders in the Building (2021– ) — If you want the Knives Out feeling stretched across a whole series, this Hulu comedy is the closest thing on television. Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez play true-crime-podcast obsessives who start investigating a death in their own Manhattan apartment building, and the writing balances genuine mystery plotting with warm, character-first comedy. Each season is its own self-contained case.
Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022) — A24’s Gen-Z whodunit strands a group of rich twenty-somethings in a storm-bound mansion, where a party game turns real and paranoia does most of the killing. It’s sharper as social satire than as a puzzle, skewering its characters’ self-absorption, but the “trapped together with a body and no trust” engine is pure Christie.
The Menu (2022) — Not a whodunit but a tonal cousin worth the detour: Ralph Fiennes plays a celebrity chef staging a very literal reckoning for the wealthy diners at his exclusive island restaurant. Like Knives Out, its real target is entitlement, and it serves its class satire with the same gleeful precision.
More From the Mind Behind Knives Out
Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (2025) — The third Benoit Blanc film sends Daniel Craig’s detective into a darker, more gothic case, with Josh O’Connor drawn into a killing tangled up in a small-town church. It leans further into mood and moral weight than the earlier two, proving the series can shift register without losing its wit.
Poker Face (2023– ) — Rian Johnson’s Peacock series stars Natasha Lyonne as a drifter with a human lie-detector’s gift, solving a fresh murder in each stand-alone episode. It’s a deliberate throwback to the “howcatchem” format of Columbo — you see the crime first, then watch her unravel it — and it’s the purest distillation of Johnson’s love for the genre.
Brick (2005) — Johnson’s debut transplants hard-boiled noir into an American high school, with Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a teenager investigating his ex-girlfriend’s death using the cadence of a 1940s detective. Stylish and precise, it’s where his knack for reinventing old mystery forms first showed up.
Where to start
If you want the closest match to Knives Out‘s exact tone, start with Glass Onion and then See How They Run. If you’re chasing the ensemble-farce energy, Clue is the shortest, most rewatchable pick here. And if you want the books that started it all, our guide to the best mystery and thriller books is the place to go — for more screen picks, see the best true crime documentaries.
