Movies Like Knives Out: Start With Glass Onion
Rian Johnson has made more than one of these. If you want the closest thing to watching Knives Out again, Glass Onion is the answer. It does something different with the same formula: it tells you how it ends early, then shows you why that makes it more interesting, not less.
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
Daniel Craig returns as Benoit Blanc, this time invited to a private island murder mystery party that becomes an actual murder mystery. Glass Onion is structurally bolder than Knives Out: it reveals its central secret at the midpoint and spends the second half showing you why that revelation makes everything more interesting. Johnson is not interested in repeating himself. He is interested in doing the same thing from a different angle.
The movie is also funnier than Knives Out and more overtly satirical. Its target is a particular kind of tech-bro confidence, and Johnson is not subtle about it. The ensemble includes Edward Norton, Janelle Monae, Kate Hudson, and Dave Bautista, all of whom are doing exactly what the movie needs them to do.
Watch it twice. The second viewing, with full knowledge of the reveal, is a completely different movie.
VIEW ON MOVIEPIQ →The best whodunit films are not about the answer. They are about the pleasure of the question.
Classic Whodunits With Wit and Style
These are the films that shaped what Knives Out was doing. Johnson knows his genre history. So should you.
Clue
Jonathan Lynn's adaptation of the board game is the closest antecedent to Knives Out in terms of tone. A group of people with secrets are invited to a mansion, someone dies, and everyone is a suspect. The comedy comes from how badly each character manages their own alibi. Tim Curry leads an ensemble that includes Madeline Kahn, Christopher Lloyd, and Michael McKean.
Clue was a box office failure in 1985 and has spent forty years becoming a cult classic. It is the movie that demonstrated the whodunit format could be genuinely funny without sacrificing the mystery mechanics. It was released with three different endings in different cinemas. All three are on the home video version.
The three-ending structure is part of the movie, not a gimmick. Watch all three the first time.
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Murder on the Orient Express
Kenneth Branagh directs and stars as Hercule Poirot in an adaptation of Agatha Christie's most famous novel. A murder on a snowbound train, twelve suspects, and a detective who needs to be wrong before he can be right. The ensemble includes Judi Dench, Penelope Cruz, Willem Dafoe, and Michelle Pfeiffer.
The movie is more interested in the moral weight of the solution than most mystery films are. Christie's novel ends with an ethical dilemma, not a tidy resolution, and Branagh respects that. For viewers who want the whodunit format taken seriously as a vehicle for moral argument, this is the version.
If you already know the solution, the movie's first half is worth watching as a study in misdirection.
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See How They Run
Tom George's movie is set in 1950s London around the production of an Agatha Christie play and is explicitly aware of every whodunit convention it is using. Sam Rockwell plays a world-weary inspector. Saoirse Ronan plays his eager constable. Someone connected to a West End production is murdered, and the movie has fun with how well everyone present knows their genre.
See How They Run is the most Knives Out-adjacent movie on this list in terms of tone: witty, self-aware, and genuinely interested in doing something with the format rather than just executing it. Rockwell's performance is particularly good.
The movie rewards genre familiarity. The more whodunits you have seen, the more jokes land.
VIEW ON MOVIEPIQ →Darker Houses and Stranger Rules
These films take the ensemble-in-a-location premise somewhere less comfortable. The wit is still there, but the stakes are higher and the genre conventions are there to be broken.
Ready or Not
A woman marries into a wealthy family and discovers on her wedding night that she must survive until dawn while her new in-laws hunt her through the estate. The premise is grotesque and the movie is very funny about it. Samara Weaving is sensational in the lead role: the movie puts her through an escalating series of increasingly absurd indignities and she responds with absolute commitment.
Ready or Not shares Knives Out's interest in the dynamics of old money, eccentric family structures, and what people will do to protect their inheritance. It takes that interest and follows it to its logical extreme. The ending is one of the most satisfying genre payoffs of the last ten years.
Watch it without reading the ending. The final five minutes are best experienced cold.
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Bad Times at the El Royale
Drew Goddard sets seven strangers in a hotel straddling the California-Nevada border in 1969 and shows you what each one of them is hiding, one character at a time. Jeff Bridges, Cynthia Erivo, Jon Hamm, and Dakota Johnson are all excellent. The movie has a Tarantino-ish structure: overlapping timelines, the same events from different perspectives, each new chapter recontextualising what came before.
Bad Times at the El Royale is the most ambitious movie on this list in terms of structure. It is also the longest and the darkest. The mystery is not who the killer is. It is what everyone in the building is actually there for, and whether any of them will get out with what they came for.
The movie has six distinct acts. Each one introduces a new piece of information that changes how you read the previous ones.
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Bodies Bodies Bodies
Halina Reijn's movie puts a group of wealthy Gen Z friends in a house during a hurricane. Someone is found dead. Everyone accuses everyone else. The movie uses the whodunit structure to satirise a very specific kind of social performance: the language of therapy and accountability deployed as weapons in a group that has no actual trust.
Bodies Bodies Bodies is hilarious and sharp and occasionally frightening. Pete Davidson, Amandla Stenberg, and Maria Bakalova are all excellent. The ending is one of the best punchlines a mystery movie has landed in years.
The final thirty seconds reframe everything. Do not look away.
VIEW ON MOVIEPIQ →A Classic Ensemble Worth Revisiting
Gosford Park
Robert Altman's ensemble murder mystery is set across a 1930s English country house weekend, with the upstairs guests and downstairs staff observed with equal interest and equal contempt. The murder, when it arrives, is almost incidental. The movie is really a dissection of the English class system using the mystery format as scaffolding.
Julian Fellowes wrote the screenplay, which he later said was the inspiration for Downton Abbey. Helen Mirren, Maggie Smith, Kristin Scott Thomas, and Clive Owen are among a cast of over thirty characters, most of whom feel fully realised. Altman overlaps dialogue in the way people actually talk. Listen to the edges of the frame.
A first watch is for orientation. A second watch is where the movie reveals itself.
VIEW ON MOVIEPIQ →All ten films on this list are built around the same pleasure as Knives Out: the satisfaction of watching a room full of people with secrets fail to keep them.
Start with Glass Onion if you want the most direct continuation. Start with Ready or Not if you want the genre pushed somewhere darker. And start with Bad Times at the El Royale if you want the most structurally ambitious movie on the list that most people overlooked.
- Clue (1985) Start at the beginning of the genre's comedic strand.
- Gosford Park (2001) The serious counterpart. Essential genre history.
- Knives Out (2019) The centrepiece. The movie this list orbits.
- Glass Onion (2022) The sequel. Different shape, same satisfaction.
- Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022) End here. The genre updated for 2022.