One of our most-wanted movies this holiday season is Rian Johnson’s Knives Out, a loopy murder-mystery with an incredible cast that includes Daniel Craig, Lakeith Stanfield and Jamie Lee Curtis. The essential premise is one of the most durable in the genre: the patriarch of the Thrombey family is found dead, and everybody has a motive for wanting him dead. Of course, Johnson moves the basic concept to some weird and wild places, but it inspired us to delve back into the library for other mystery movies where whole families are the suspects.
Harper
Paul Newman stars in this 1966 mystery with a screenplay by the great William Goldman, and it’s a perfect entree into the world of family murder mysteries. When private dick Lew Harper picks up the missing persons case of hateful multimillionaire Ralph Sampson, he soon discovers that pretty much everybody in the man’s family had a reason to want him dead. This is a fun one for a number of reasons, including the absolutely legendary cast. Lauren Bacall plays Sampson’s hard-as-nails wife with gusto, and the supporting cast includes con men, cult leaders, and more.
8 Women
François Ozon’s gleefully dark comedy follows an octet of ladies who gather in their country house for Christmas break only to be shocked by the murder of the family patriarch, Marcel. After he’s stabbed in the back in bed, everybody instantly becomes a suspect and all of their dark secrets come out. Oh, did we mention that 8 Women is also a musical? This is a brilliantly weird movie that takes all the tropes of the locked room murder and gleefully twists them into pretzels for your amusement, showing how the Agatha Christie classics can be used for more than just “who done it?”
Another Thin Man
William Powell and Myrna Loy as the protagonist couple of the Thin Man movies are some of the most iconic cinematic detectives of all time, a quick-witted pair that find themselves embroiled in tricky cases despite being ostensibly retired. In the third film in the series, Nick and Nora are invited to Colonel Burr MacFay’s Long Island summer house to investigate threats the wealthy man is being sent. When Colonel McFay is found dead, a disgruntled former employee is the prime suspect. However, as Nick and Nora dig deeper into the MacFay family and house staff to reveal suspects in every corner.
Crooked House
Agatha Christie was the undisputed master of the mystery form, and several of her stories dealt with a murder where the suspects were family. 2017’s British film Crooked House adapts one of her best. When the granddaughter of tycoon Aristide Leonides hires a private investigator to get to the bottom of his untimely death, we soon learn that the suspects are all drawn from the sprawling and heavily dysfunctional Leonides family, who all had their own reasons to knock off the old man. Plenty of red herrings and dirty secrets spill out in the investigation before the wild shock ending.
What a Carve Up!
Underrated British black comedy What a Carve Up! is a key touchstone for the family murder mystery. It kicks off with the living relatives of wealthy Gabriel Broughton summoned to his country home for the reading of his will, where they all learn that he left them nothing. When the lights go out unexpectedly, bodies start piling up and our protagonist, the wastrel Ernest Broughton, needs to figure out what’s going on before he winds up dead like the rest of his family. Everybody’s a suspect, the killer is quite a twist, and it’s just a really solid movie that deserves rediscovery.
You’re Next
For more of a survival horror take on the concept, Adam Wingard’s You’re Next has a pretty great family murder mystery twist. When Erin goes with her boyfriend Crispian to his family reunion at their Missouri vacation home, things are normal but awkward until an unknown assailant shoots two of the guests with a crossbow. The family soon finds themselves under attack from a gang of animal-masked home intruders looking to rack up a body count. Their motivation isn’t just cheap thrills, though, as it turns out one (or maybe more) of the family was in on the whole scheme in order to secure their inheritance. Die poor, people, it’ll save your family a lot of trouble.
Gosford Park
So many of these family murder mysteries take place at a country house, which is just another reason to never leave the city. Robert Altman’s 2001 black comedy Gosford Park follows familiar footsteps as it sets up the stabbing death of Sir William McCordle during a weekend outing, giving the myriad family members and staff assembled there perfectly good reasons to want to see him killed. When a pair of police inspectors show up to investigate, things get even more complicated when it’s revealed that Sir William was poisoned before he was stabbed, but everything ends up working out for the best, more or less.
The Cat And The Canary
Family murder mysteries often kick off with the reading of a will, as nothing drives a person’s heart to murder quite like the prospect of sharing an inheritance. 1939 thriller The Cat And The Canary is set in a decrepit Louisiana bayou mansion, where the eight heirs of millionaire Cyrus Norman have gathered after his death. His will says that insanity runs in the bloodline, so primary heir Joyce must remain sane for 30 years in order to get everything. This naturally kicks off a wild spate of murders and scares as the survivors are picked off one by one, with the killer someone in the surviving family.
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