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Something has gone haywire with our collective recall when it comes to mystery movies. We’re living in a golden age of streaming whodunnits, psychological thrillers, and twist-laden page-to-screen adaptations, and somehow we can’t remember any of them past the week they drop. Peak content has given us peak amnesia. A movie can star Florence Pugh, earn an 85% on Rotten Tomatoes, and still get wiped from our brains within a month because twelve other things came out that same Tuesday.
This list won’t solve that bigger cultural problem, but it will help you sift through Netflix‘s overstuffed catalog of mystery films worth circling back to. These movies are the ones we’re dragging back into the spotlight, because they’re airtight from opening frame to final twist, and most of you have already forgotten they exist.
‘They Cloned Tyrone’ (2023)
Juel Taylor‘s directorial debut opens with a drug dealer getting murdered, waking up the next morning like nothing happened, and deciding to investigate why. From that premise alone, They Cloned Tyrone could go anywhere, and it does, careening through a neon-soaked, retro-styled conspiracy thriller that blends Invasion of the Body Snatchers with 1970s exploitation cinema and a Scooby-Doo investigation conducted by three people who have no business working together. John Boyega plays Fontaine, the resurrected hustler. Jamie Foxx is Slick Charles, a pimp with a gift for self-narration. Teyonah Parris is Yo-Yo, a sex worker who turns out to be the smartest person in the room by a wide margin.
The trio’s chemistry is electric, the production design is meticulous, and Taylor’s script manages to be laugh-out-loud funny and genuinely unsettling about its central theme: the long, documented history of government experimentation on Black communities. It earned a 95% on Rotten Tomatoes and then got swallowed by the same summer that gave us Barbenheimer. With a cast this good and a concept this wild, They Cloned Tyrone should be talked about the way we talk about Get Out or Sorry to Bother You, as a genre-bending original that actually has something on its mind.
‘The Pale Blue Eye’ (2022)
If you’ve ever wanted to watch Christian Bale and the kid who played Dudley Dursley solve a satanic murder at West Point while it snows aggressively in the background, well then boy, do we have a movie for you. Scott Cooper‘s 2022 gothic thriller casts Bale as Augustus Landor, a retired detective hired to investigate a cadet’s grisly death at the military academy in 1830. His unlikely partner in the investigation: a peculiar young cadet named Edgar Allan Poe, played by Harry Melling with a twitchy, romantic intensity that makes you fully believe this guy will grow up to write about hearts beating beneath floorboards.
The mystery pays off in a way that makes you want to immediately rewatch the first hour, but The Pale Blue Eye is really a hang-out movie disguised as a murder investigation. Lantern-lit corridors, ink-stained fingers, coats that look like they weigh thirty pounds… this thing could coast on the atmosphere alone and still be worth your time. Gillian Anderson and Robert Duvall show up in supporting roles (the latter in one of his final screen appearances), and Cooper builds a world so inviting you’ll want to stay a bit longer once the puzzle’s solved. Wild thing to say about a film where someone steals a corpse’s heart, but here we are.
‘Luckiest Girl Alive’ (2022)
Mila Kunis plays Ani FaNelli, a sharp-tongued New York Magazine writer whose life looks like a vision board come to life: corner office energy, wealthy fiancé, Nantucket wedding on the calendar. Naturally, you begin to wonder what she’s hiding the second she opens her mouth.
Based on Jessica Knoll‘s bestselling novel (Knoll also wrote the screenplay), the 2022 adaptation keeps you guessing about what exactly Ani is running from by feeding you just enough flashbacks to her teenage years at a prestigious private school to know something went very wrong there. When a true crime documentarian comes knocking, asking Ani to revisit that history on camera, the whole glossy scaffolding starts to buckle. With Finn Wittrock, Connie Britton, and Jennifer Beals filling out the supporting cast, Luckiest Girl Alive plays like Gone Girl‘s scrappier, angrier cousin. Plus, Kunis has never been better.
‘The Wonder’ (2022)
Florence Pugh in a gothic Irish thriller where she has to figure out whether a little girl is performing a miracle or being slowly killed by one? We’re seated, sans corsets. Sebastián Lelio‘s period mystery flew under the radar when it hit Netflix in 2022, which is baffling given its premise. Pugh plays Lib Wright, an English nurse sent to a remote village in 1862 to observe an eleven-year-old who hasn’t eaten in months. The locals are calling the girl’s hunger-strike divine, but Lib isn’t buying it.
Adapted from Emma Donoghue‘s novel and co-starring Ciarán Hinds and Toby Jones, the film has this foggy, rain-soaked atmosphere and sinister religious underpinning that gives every scene an unsettling filter. But what keeps you locked in is how personal the mystery becomes. Lib starts as an outsider doing a job and ends up in a full-on war with a community that would rather protect an idea than a living, breathing being. Pugh is doing some of her most restrained work here, which only makes the moments where she finally loses it that much more satisfying. The ending feels surprising, but earned… supernaturally-tinged but grounded in real human vulnerabilities. It’s more rooted in the philosophical than others on this list, but that’s what makes it worth a watch.
‘Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery’ (2022)
Fine, you probably saw this one. But have you watched it lately? Because Rian Johnson‘s 2022 sequel to Knives Out is one of those movies that gets richer on repeat viewings, partly because its puzzle-box structure hides so many clues in plain sight that you’ll spend the entire rewatch slapping your forehead. Daniel Craig returns as Benoit Blanc, this time peeling back the ego of tech billionaire Miles Bron (Edward Norton, doing an Elon Musk-adjacent heel turn with gleeful abandon) on a private Greek island surrounded by Bron’s circle of sycophantic, backstabbing friends.
The ensemble is absurd in terms of talent. Janelle Monáe delivers a performance with more layers than the titular glass vegetable. Kate Hudson is hilarious as a problematic fashion designer, Dave Bautista plays a men’s rights streamer, Kathryn Hahn is a politician whose moral compass spins like a weathervane. Johnson stuffs every frame with visual gags, pop culture references, and pointed satire about how wealth insulates people from consequences, and somehow the central mystery still works. If you haven’t revisited it in a few years, you’re overdue for a watch.
‘The Weekend Away’ (2022)
A girls’ trip to Croatia. A blackout night. A missing best friend. A local police force that could not care less. The Weekend Away borrows from every vacation-thriller playbook ever written, but Leighton Meester commits so fully to the bit that you forgive every improbable twist. She plays Beth, a new mom dragged to Split by her recently divorced best friend Kate (Christina Wolfe), who promptly vanishes after a night of clubbing. Beth wakes up foggy, phone-less, and immediately becomes the primary suspect in everyone’s eyes, including her own husband’s (Luke Norris).
This movie has no qualms about what it is. Director Kim Farrant keeps the runtime tight at 89 minutes, the Croatian scenery gorgeous, and the red herrings flying fast enough that you’ll cycle through at least four different theories before the actual reveal. Is it preposterous? Absolutely. Is the final twist the kind of thing you’d scream about in a group chat? Also, yes. But it’s a good time that you won’t be able to predict the ending to… kind of like every real-life girls’ trip you’ve ever been on. Oooooo, a metaphor.
‘Lost Girls’ (2020)
Based on the real story of the Long Island serial killer and Robert Kolker‘s nonfiction book of the same name, Lost Girls follows Mari Gilbert (Amy Ryan), a mother whose search for her missing daughter leads to the discovery of multiple unsolved murders along Long Island’s South Shore. Director Liz Garbus, a two-time Oscar-nominated documentarian, brings a reporter’s instinct to the material, refusing to sensationalize the crimes or soften the institutional failures that let a serial killer operate in plain sight for over a decade.
Ryan is the engine here, playing Mari as combative, exhausted, and impossible to ignore. She’s backed by a supporting cast that includes Gabriel Byrne and Thomasin McKenzie, but the film belongs to her and the uncomfortable truth it keeps circling: these women went missing because the system decided they didn’t matter enough to find. Garbus doesn’t offer the catharsis of a solved case, but by the end credits, you’re not that worried about answers anyway.
‘The Woman in the Window’ (2021)
The Woman in the Window is not a great movie by most conventional metrics. Critics were lukewarm, and the production was kind of cursed. But here’s our case for it: Amy Adams, alone in a cavernous Manhattan brownstone, chugging Merlot, popping pills, and spying on her neighbors through rain-streaked windows while Danny Elfman‘s score goes absolutely feral in the background. If that pitch doesn’t do it for you, we want different things from our evenings.
Adams plays Dr. Anna Fox, an agoraphobic child psychologist who witnesses what she believes to be a violent crime in the apartment across the street, only for every person in her life to insist she imagined it. Gary Oldman is the suspicious new neighbor, Julianne Moore shows up for a single scene and makes it deeply unsettling, and Brian Tyree Henry steals the movie as a skeptical detective just trying to help. Director Joe Wright shoots the brownstone like a haunted house and the plot piles on twists with an enthusiasm that borders on reckless. It’s messy, overcooked, and the kind of movie that keeps you planted on the couch for its full runtime purely because you need to know how this ridiculous thing ends. Sometimes that’s enough.
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https://collider.com/forgotten-netflix-mystery-movies-perfect-start-to-finish/
Jessica Toomer
Almontather Rassoul
