Rian Johnson’s 2019 film is the easiest recommendation in the genre right now. It is funny, it is fast, and it understands the rules well enough to break one of them on purpose.
Why it works as a mystery
The clueing is genuinely fair. Everything you need is on screen, placed where a careful viewer could catch it, and the film does not cheat with information withheld from the audience but known to the detective.
That is rarer than it sounds. Most screen mysteries resolve on something nobody could have deduced. This one resolves on things you saw.
The structural move
About a third of the way through, the film does something that appears to dismantle the premise. We will not say what. The effect is that you spend the middle hour watching a different kind of film than you thought you started, and the mystery reassembles itself around you.
It is a real risk and it pays off, because the film has a second engine underneath the puzzle: a family arguing about who deserves what, which stays interesting whether or not you are tracking clues.
Daniel Craig
The accent divides people. Taken as a deliberate performance choice rather than an attempt at realism, it is very funny and it gives the detective the thing these characters need — a register that is obviously artificial, so you never quite know how much he is performing.
Watch it if
You want to know whether you like whodunits. Two hours, no prior knowledge, and it is built to be watched twice.
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