Three Things to Stream: Nothing Beats a Good Mystery
If you need a break from holiday programming, challenge your brain with these mysteries.
By Angela Davis
CORRESPONDENT
One of the most fascinating stories in fiction is the mystery. The audience is invited to take part in solving a case by pick up clues and trying to determine who is the cause of the crime. In a way, it’s the closest any story, outside of video games, can get to being interactive with the audience. Test out your detective skills this weekend with these three films you can stream online.
Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (Netflix) (Rated PG-13)
The Knives Out franchise has become one of the most popular mystery franchises in recent years because of its subversion of common genre tropes. Benoit Blanc is a fantastic detective who joins the ranks of other iconic heroes like Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot. Now, after two successful entries in the series—Knives Out (streaming on Prime Video) and Glass Onion (streaming on Netflix)—a new entry is officially dropping this weekend on Netflix.
Wake Up Dead Man will follow Blanc as he dives into a new mystery after a young priest joins a local church for assistance. When a murder is discovered, it’s up to Blanc to solve the case. Knowing this series, there’s bound to be more than meets the eye. There’s always something interesting lying underneath the standard mystery formula in these films, and it will be interesting to see how this film subverts expectations.
The Hateful Eight (Netflix) (Rated R)
The eighth film in Quentin Tarantino’s stunning oeuvre presented his take on a murder mystery. Now, ten years later, it’s still well-regarded as one of his best. The story follows two bounty hunters (Kurt Russell and Samuel L. Jackson) and a criminal (Jennifer Jason Leigh). The trio soon gets cornered in a snowstorm with a soon-to-be sheriff (Walton Goggins) and a band of other characters at Minnie’s Haberdashery. As the night drags on, they discover that someone in the building isn’t who they say they are and will kill to set the criminal free.
The amount of suspense layered throughout this nearly three hour epic is something to behold. There’s a constant sense of dread and mistrust throughout as the bounty hunters and the audience piece together who might be working with the criminal. What makes this even better though is the script. Tarantino’s iconic talent for screenwriting makes the long stretches where characters are just talking highly engaging. There’s no wasted time throughout this film, and it’s earned its title as a modern mystery classic.
Scream I-VI (Paramount+) (Rated R)
The Scream franchise has become one of the most famous and well-regarded series in film history since the first entry dropped in the 1990s. The saga follows Sydney Prescott (and later Sam Carpenter) as she finds herself in her own horror movie with a killer stalking the town in a Ghostface costume. To survive, she’ll need to follow the rules of scary movies and figure out who the killer is before they strike again.
The thing that makes this series so refreshing regardless of how many sequels are made is that each film works as a murder mystery. While Ghostface returns in every film, the man or woman behind the mask is different every time. This makes each entry an engaging whodunnit that also analyzes tropes of the horror genre. With a seventh film releasing in February, now’s the time to try out this mystery classic if you haven’t yet.
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