How many ways are there to ask “whodunit?” As far as Hollywood is concerned, the question cannot be asked often enough.
In recent years, producers and studio bosses have found unexpected box-office riches in the seemingly antiquated genre of the whodunit, that instantly recognizable variation of the murder mystery in which clues, hints, and bits of evidence about a crime coalesce into a pleasingly complete resolution.
This is an altogether unexpected development. It often seems that most contemporary, big-budget movies either derive from one of the so-called comic book universes, are spun off from earlier film franchises, or are aimed to satisfy the infantile tastes of what Dr. Seuss would have called “obsolete children” — in other words, the adults who make hits out of movies such as F9: The Fast Saga, Godzilla vs. Kong, or Sonic the Hedgehog 2. Yet over the last five or so years, major studios have churned out two grandly scaled feature films derived from classics written by British mystery master Agatha Christie. Although her work has remained a steady presence on television thanks to the British series Poirot and numerous Christie-derived TV movies and miniseries, Kenneth Branagh’s 2017 adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express was not only Hollywood’s first large-scale Christie adaptation in eons but a gigantic popular success. Without violating the spirit of the original book, the film, starring Branagh as Belgian detective Hercule Poirot canvasing a train for a killer, took off with moviegoers to the tune of $352 million.
A trend seemed to be in the offing when, that same year, another Christie novel, Crooked House, was turned into a nifty indie feature starring Glenn Close. Any doubt was erased with the arrival of Knives Out in 2019: Rian Johnson’s brilliantly engrossing, seemingly universally loved film, starring Daniel Craig as a detective trying to wring some sense out of a death that has taken place on a grand estate. It was not based on a work by Christie but owed much to her influence in a genre she helped shape.
Now the trend is a cottage industry: Branagh’s Poirot-starring sequel, Death on the Nile, was a hit earlier this year; Johnson’s Knives Out sequel, Glass Onion, one of many promised entries in what has evolved into its own series, will make its debut in December. And we regularly encounter lesser imitators, including the recent See How They Run. It stars Sam Rockwell and Saoirse Ronan as British police officials asked to sort out a murder in the London theater scene, the plot of which folds in, you guessed it, Christie’s play The Mousetrap. On the small screen, shows such as Big Little Lies, Mare of Easttown, and Only Murders in the Building are riding the coattails of this unlikely resurgence.
At this point, Hollywood is simply reacting to audience demand. The Christie-based and Christie-influenced films of Branagh and Johnson are blockbusters by any definition, and even the modest See How They Run clicked with audiences. So why has the public cottoned to the Christie cult specifically and the whodunit genre generally?
Perhaps all of those public television shows kept the fire alive, or maybe it’s a case of everything old becoming new again. Both are distinct possibilities, but the robust reemergence of so old-fashioned a genre — the legitimate Christie adaptations all take place in the past, and even the ostensibly contemporary-set Knives Out feels out of time — suggests there is something more significant afoot. After all, no one is clamoring to see the return of other old-timey film forms, such as Howard Hawks-style screwball comedies or Kirk Douglas-style melodramas.
Let us ponder the timing of Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express. Released in the fall of 2017, the film came in the first year of the Trump administration, a period that only seems settled when compared with the dramas to follow: impeachment, a pandemic, shutdowns, Jan. 6. Even then, most people were feeling anxious, stressed, and worn-out by the news, which flows ceaselessly thanks to modern communication. Our phones, our push notifications, and our social media networks conspire not to keep us in touch with each other as much as in touch with whatever might outrage or offend us at any given moment.
In this light, the revival of the whodunit constitutes a kind of retreat from breaking news, Twitter feeds, and YouTube videos. These are films that are centered on cozy, confined locations — a train in Orient Express, an estate in Knives Out, a cruise ship in Nile — where the outside world seems distant. That they concern the most horrible of acts, murder, doesn’t diminish their escapist value: first, because their wink-and-a-nod tone tells us that we aren’t meant to perceive the murders as actual events involving the loss of life but as plot devices, and second, because they promise, unlike real-life crime, a firm adjudication. We know we will learn who done it.
The great lyricist and composer Stephen Sondheim co-wrote one of the best American whodunits not based on a work by Christie, the 1973 film The Last of Sheila. In a 2005 interview, Sondheim, famously gaga for puzzles and games, compared that enthusiasm with the pleasure of murder mysteries. “Art, in itself, is an attempt to bring order out of chaos, and certainly puzzles,” Sondheim said. “The nice thing about doing a crossword puzzle is you know there is a solution. I also like murder mysteries for the same reason. … The Agatha Christie kinds of things where you know that it’s all going to be neatly wound up at the end and everything’s going to make logical sense.”
For audiences in the late 2010s and early 2020s, for whom much about the real world is threatening, makes little sense, and seems irresolvable, whodunits function as the ultimate safe spaces. We enter the confines of the movie theater, cloaked in darkness but full of bright, buzzing things, a bit like a combination between a confessional booth and a carnival fun house, to hop aboard a train or journey on a ship or temporarily take up residence in a mansion. Furthermore, because the best whodunits spur the audience to piece together the mystery, they are made in accordance with Alfred Hitchcock’s distinction between mystery and suspense.
“Especially in my particular job of work, there’s a great confusion between the words mystery and suspense,” Hitchcock said at a session at the American Film Institute in 1970. “The two things are absolutely miles apart. You see, mystery is an intellectual process, like in a whodunit, but suspense is essentially an emotional process.”
Hitchcock generally made the latter, but the appeal of his suspense pictures, particularly those produced in Britain, such as The Lady Vanishes (the ne plus ultra of mystery-aboard-a-train pictures), is comparable to those of Christie and her copiers. The British not only do monarchy better than anyone else but also a certain peculiar brand of scary hominess: Curling up with The Lady Vanishes or the Margaret Rutherford Miss Marple movies or any version of Murder on the Orient Express (whether Branagh’s or the 1974 version with Albert Finney) is the cinematic equivalent of coming in from a rain-swept day in a big coat and wellies, tossing wood into the fireplace, and sitting in an armchair with an English cocker spaniel by your side. Even Knives Out, while American-based and featuring a Southern-accented Craig, kindled something of this atmosphere.
The whodunit’s time will surely again pass. The genre has ebbed and flowed for decades. The Thin Man series of the 1930s and ’40s were all the rage until they wore out their welcome, the Miss Marple movies of the 1960s were a welcome respite from the convulsions of that decade, and Sidney Lumet’s Deathtrap and Clue — the latter spun off from the board game, starring Tim Curry, Madeline Kahn, and Colleen Camp, and released to theaters loaded with multiple endings — proved that the form could survive the go-go 1980s. An early indicator of the current wave came way back in 2001, when Robert Altman decamped to England to make one of his greatest films, the combination whodunit-class system expose Gosford Park.
But now we need them again. In a time when most of us feel rocked by the tremors of political life and unsteadied by the chaos of the pandemic’s aftereffects, the whodunit has provided much-needed succor. Watching these movies and shows, we feel as snug as a bug in a rug — a good place to be in 2022.
Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.
