Why the whodunnit movie refuses to be killed off

The new whodunnit movie See How They Run opens with a skewering and a dissection. The target isn’t a person, but the film’s own genre. “You’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all,” sneers narrator Leo Köpernick, an American movie director (played by Adrien Brody) in postwar London, where he has begrudgingly agreed to adapt Agatha Christie’s hit play The Mousetrap. He goes on to itemise the many storytelling limitations of the form. Moments later, he finds himself the victim of irony — and a blow to the head.

The murder mystery itself has proved more adept at dodging death. For well over a century, it has survived critiques and weathered forecasts of its imminent decline as narratively richer, psychologically more complex “whydunnits” have emerged. As Dr Lucy Donaldson, who teaches a course on detective and murder mystery cinema at the University of St Andrews, points out, it’s the “basic, often predictable structure of the whodunnit” that has enabled the genre to survive. Its commitment to rules and “emphasis on resolutions” provides a welcome sense of “safety, comfort and reassurance”, while the inherent simplicity of the form gives it a “flexibility which means it can be adapted to any time or place”. 

Two new films capture both the genre’s elasticity and consistency. See How They Run is a period-set detective yarn. Directed by British film-maker Tom George, it follows the odd couple of semi-sozzled veteran Inspector Stoppard (Sam Rockwell) and bright-eyed rookie Constable Stalker (Saoirse Ronan) in their investigations into the cast and crew of The Mousetrap following Köpernick’s death.

The other film, Bodies Bodies Bodies, is a TikTok-era tale about a group of vapid, narcissistic Gen-Zers (Pete Davidson, Amandla Stenberg and Maria Bakalova among them) whose party at a country mansion during a hurricane is soured when they start being picked off by an unknown killer. The two films couldn’t be more different tonally but both are, in essence, classic ensemble whodunnits driven by the conventions of clue-searching, shifting suspicions, red herrings and revelations.

For Halina Reijn, director of Bodies Bodies Bodies, those conventions were a source of security and comfort, much as they are for audiences. “I felt the safety of the anchor of the closed-off constructs, and that was completely freeing,” the Dutch actress turned film-maker tells me via Zoom from the roof of a house in the Hamptons, New York. “When you can lean on the puzzle, you have more time to focus on how to create your own dark, crazy vibe.”

In her film, that vibe is “nihilistic”, the characters shedding any veneer of kinship at the first sign of threat. “We are all beasts even though we’re so enlightened and intellectual,” she says. “When the WiFi cuts out, the monsters arrive.” This pessimism might have been a hard sell were it not packaged in such an entertaining form. “If you use a genre, you can reach a much bigger audience and then you can talk about our times and secretly spoon-feed them your darker ideas,” she says. “We are all capable [of evil], so it’s important to keep telling stories about it, and the murder-mystery construct makes it more accessible than if it was Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” 

In the case of Bodies, not only more accessible, but almost tangible. For all its knowing, ever-escalating absurdity, the film also has a very real and spontaneous feel. The whodunnit typically leaves little room for authenticity (due to its heavy use of stock characters, explanatory dialogue and necessary trajectory), but for Reijn it was imperative to keep things “raw and truthful” even while operating within this framework.

“It was constantly on my mind that you feel trapped with them, that you’re looking for clues and don’t understand what’s going on,” she says. “The genre works because it sucks you in. It [speaks to] our animalistic side of wanting to solve something.”

An anecdote shared by Tom George illustrates this neatly: as a youngster he would watch whodunnits with a notepad, trying to beat Poirot to the punch. I ask if he thinks the immersive nature of the murder mystery has helped it compete with more sophisticated modes of storytelling. “In every film you’re looking to get the audience to relate to the core characters, but in a whodunnit there’s an easy path: the [viewers] are literally trying to solve the case, so they’re totally in lockstep with the [protagonists].”

Given his longstanding affection for the genre, I ask whether the archness of his film risks breaking the spell. “The film isn’t about undermining its own stakes. It has to satisfy as a whodunnit in its own right, otherwise the audience feels short-changed,” he says. “But it’s taking advantage of tropes and structures to add a layer of self-awareness that gives it a contemporary feel, even though it’s set in the 1950s.” 

George’s efforts to give his film a distinctly modern feel extend beyond its modishly self-reflexive humour and slightly sitcomish cadences. The costumes and the soundtrack were meticulously devised to echo the murder mysteries of the postwar era, even while taking liberties with colour and sound “to stop [anything] from feeling like a stuffy revisit of what’s gone before”. In this way, George has managed to steer the film away from the nostalgia trap that Kenneth Branagh fell into with his recent big-budget, big-moustache Poirot movies.

While the throwback nature of those films served only to make the whodunnit feel dated, a new crop of more original, more subversive whodunnits has helped refresh the genre. Old traditions are revitalised by being juxtaposed with zeitgeisty humour (as in See How They Run and TV series such as The Afterparty and Only Murders in the Building) or with social commentary, as found in Bodies Bodies Bodies’ depiction of validation-craving youth culture, and the biting satire of affluent white America in Rian Johnson’s Knives Out.

The immense box-office success of the latter (which persuaded Netflix to pay $469mn for two upcoming sequels) shows that there is still a healthy appetite for whodunnits. But could the genre’s popularity be undercut by the ever-increasing popularity of true crime, which offers viewers meatier, real-life stakes?

“More often than not, in my experience, true crime leaves you wishing for more of a story or complexity. There’s a saturation point at which all those [procedurals] start to sound the same,” says George, sounding almost like Köpernick. You’ve seen one true crime series, you’ve seen them all. “There will always be a place for the narrative version.”

‘See How They Run’ and ‘Bodies Bodies Bodies’ are in cinemas from September 9