The 6 Best Mystery Movies Released Since 2020, Ranked
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Everyone knows how irritating a half-answer can be. Someone says they are fine when they are clearly not. A room goes quiet at the wrong second. A story has one detail that sounds rehearsed. These tiny gaps can sit in the brain for hours, because people are naturally drawn to whatever feels unfinished. Mystery movies take that feeling and turn it into an entire emotional experience.
The best ones know the truth is just the destination. The actual ride is watching characters scramble, spitting out terrible lies, hiding deep scars, and completely misjudging the people around them. It’s exactly this kind of deception that makes these six movies stand out. They refuse to stay still.
6 'The Kid Detective' (2020)
The Kid Detective follows Abe Applebaum (Adam Brody), a detective who peaked before puberty and never recovered. He was once the pride of his sleepy hometown, the clever kid solving cute little mysteries. Now he is 32, hungover, broke, mocked by everyone, and running a sad private-eye office where lost cats count as serious business. The trench coat, the old clippings, the whole childish detective routine. It all feels funny until you realize Abe is clinging to the only version of himself that ever made sense.
Then Caroline (Sophie Nélisse) walks in with an actual murder case. Her boyfriend has been stabbed, and suddenly Abe’s little fantasy job has real blood in it. The movie snaps into something sharper as he stumbles through clues, shame, and old trauma. What starts as a dark joke turns into a painful mystery about the childhood failure that completely froze his life.
5 'The Dry' (2020)
The Dry has heat baked into every frame. The plot centers on Aaron Falk (Eric Bana), who returns to his rural Australian hometown after 20 years. He is there for the funeral of his childhood best friend, a man who supposedly murdered his family before taking his own life. Nobody is glad to see Falk back. The town is brittle from drought, grief, and old resentment. The ground is cracked, the sun is punishing, the livestock are dying, and every conversation feels one wrong word away from turning ugly.
That tension gives the mystery its bite. To make matters worse, as Falk tries to dissect the present-day killing, the old drowning tied to his own past keeps rising back up. Gretchen (Genevieve O’Reilly) adds another layer of buried history, and the locals keep giving him just enough truth to make the next lie obvious. It’s suffocating. The whole movie feels parched, angry, and ready to burn.
4 'Missing' (2023)
Missing turns a laptop into a panic room. The setup drops us in Los Angeles, where June Allen (Storm Reid) is half-living online while her mother Grace (Nia Long) takes a vacation to Colombia. Then, radio silence. She never comes home. Consequently, when the calls stall and official channels drag, June is forced to start searching on her own. Immediately, she starts noticing the wrong details. She finds strange accounts, missing answers, and a boyfriend who may have been lying from the start.
The movie moves like someone clicking faster than they can breathe. June jumps between inboxes, security cameras, payment trails, map pins, search history, saved passwords, and desperate video calls, trying to build a rescue mission out of whatever the internet gives her. A dead login becomes a disaster. Even worse, a password reset sent to the wrong device is enough to make your stomach drop. But, what makes Missing so fun is how restless it is. June may be stuck in one room, but the movie is sprinting across the world through her screen.
Collider Exclusive · 8 Questions · 2 Minutes Which Coen Brothers Movie Would You Thrive In? Lebowski · O Brother · Fargo · No Country
Nobody writes people like the Coen brothers. The decent ones. The talkers. The ones who stopped trying years ago. And the ones who can already see how bad this is going to get. Four films, four completely different ways of handling trouble. Eight questions decide which one you would actually walk out of.
🎳Lebowski(1998)
🎸O Brother(2000)
❄️Fargo(1996)
🪙No Country(2007)
01
A bag of money lands in your lap. What happens next? Every Coen film starts roughly here. It never goes smoothly.
02
Somebody is being completely unreasonable with you. How does it go? Coen dialogue is mostly people failing to understand each other.
03
What is your actual relationship with work? Everyone in these films is either working far too hard or not at all.
04
Long drive, bad weather, nobody else on the road. How are you? There is always a drive in these films. It is never a good drive.
05
You are offered a shortcut that is not quite legal. This is the moment where the Coens find out who you really are.
06
The plan has fallen apart completely. What is your move? In a Coen film the plan always falls apart. That is the genre.
07
Which of these sounds most like something you would say? Nobody writes a line quite like the Coens. Which one is yours?
08
How does your film end? Eight questions in, this is the one that decides your movie.
The Verdict Is In Your Coen Film Is…
Four films, four completely different ways of handling money, trouble and other people. This is the one you would survive, why it suits you, and what it would cost you to be there.
The Big Lebowski
You have quietly arranged your life so that very little can get to you, and a surprising number of people find that infuriating. You would be completely at home here.
- The Dude is the only person in the film with no ambition, and the only one who comes out the other side undamaged. That is not an accident.
- You do not chase things. You let situations arrive and you deal with them at your own pace, which is a genuine skill however lazy it looks.
- This is a full crime plot happening around a man who mostly wants his rug back, and that is exactly the energy you would bring to it.
- Everything goes wrong. You abide. The film ends.
O Brother
You talk your way through life and it works far more often than it should. Give you a bad situation and an audience and you will find a way out of both at once.
- Everett never has a plan that survives contact with reality. He has something better, which is the ability to keep talking until a new one turns up.
- You are the optimist in the group, the one who makes a ridiculous idea sound reasonable at two in the morning.
- This is the warmest film the Coens have made. It is a chase, a comedy and a musical at once, and nobody in it is quite beyond saving.
- You would end up famous entirely by accident, and act like you planned it all along.
Fargo
You would survive Fargo because you are the only kind of person who does: patient, decent, and completely unimpressed by anybody trying to be clever.
- Marge Gunderson solves the whole case by being polite, thorough and unhurried while everybody around her panics. That is the entire argument of the film.
- You do the boring parts of the job, which is precisely why you would notice the thing everyone else walked straight past.
- Fargo is about ordinary greed causing enormous damage, and about one person who simply refuses to be corrupted by any of it.
- You would go home at the end of it, have dinner, and sleep perfectly well.
No Country
You do not expect the world to be fair and you stopped being surprised about it a long time ago. That clear-eyed quality is exactly what this film asks for.
- No Country is the Coens at their coldest: a film where being smart, fast and careful might still not be anywhere near enough.
- You plan for the worst, you keep your own counsel, and some part of you is already working out the exit.
- Llewelyn Moss is competent, prepared and resourceful, and the film is honest about whether any of that is ever sufficient.
- You would see it coming. Whether that helps is the one question the film refuses to answer.
3 'Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery' (2025)
On paper, Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery sounds like a deliciously old-fashioned whodunit. In reality, it strips the coziness out of the locked-room setup and injects it with a harsh, angry pulse. It follows Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor), who is a disgraced former boxer turned priest, reassigned to a decaying upstate New York parish ruled by Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin), a hardline figure whose authority has poisoned the whole place. During a Good Friday service, Wicks is found dead inside a cramped closet adjoining the chancel, with a devil’s-head knife in his back. That is exactly the kind of impossible crime Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) was born to enter.
The holy backdrop gives the whole setup a nasty edge. The congregation whispers, judges, schemes, and performs morality while clearly hiding rot under the surface. The empty space where the crucifix should be is such a sharp detail because it makes the parish’s buried violence feel visible even when nobody says it directly. Blanc and Jud’s uneasy alliance gives the film its soul. It becomes a story of logic and faith clashing, then slowly learning how to listen. And it totally works.
2 'Decision to Leave' (2022)
Decision to Leave is barely interested in making detective work look cool, which is exactly why it feels so hypnotic. Hae-joon (Park Hae-il) is an exhausted, insomniac detective investigating a man’s fatal fall from a mountain peak. His eyes look tired before the romance even starts poisoning him. Then he meets Seo-rae (Tang Wei), the dead man’s widow, whose calmness feels too strange to ignore and too fascinating to resist.
The mystery lives in quiet rooms and late-night surveillance. Hae-joon watches her through binoculars, listens to her breathing, studies her movements, and slowly crosses the line between investigation and longing. It becomes an addiction. Every interrogation feels intimate. Every glance across the table feels like someone losing control in slow motion. The murder pulls Hae-joon in, but the love story destroys him. When he finally compromises his own evidence and his own sense of order, the film has become a mystery about obsession more than guilt.
1 'Anatomy of a Fall' (2023)
Sometimes the truth simply stays out of reach. Anatomy of a Fall weaponizes that exact same concept. And it does so flawlessly. The plot kicks off with Sandra Voyter (Sandra Hüller), who lives in a remote, snowy chalet with her frustrated husband Samuel (Samuel Theis) and their visually impaired son Daniel (Milo Machado Graner). Then, one morning, Samuel is found dead in the snow beneath an upper-floor window. There are no easy answers, no clean explanation to fall back on. Instead, Sandra is dragged straight into a courtroom where her marriage gets torn apart in public, piece by piece.
The film is fascinating because every answer creates another discomfort. Sandra’s calmness can look like innocence or calculation. The recorded argument feels horribly private when played through sterile courtroom speakers. Her posture, her pauses, her defensiveness, even her intelligence are all used against her. At the center of it all, Daniel’s position is the most painful part, because the case slowly asks a child to decide what version of his parents he can survive believing. Death is just the hook here. But, the real film is about how people invent certainty when the absolute truth remains unclear. And that ambiguity is brutal. It feels far too honest.
Anatomy of a Fall
9 10
- Release Date
- May 22, 2023
- Runtime
- 151 Minutes
- Director
- Justine Triet
- Writers
- Justine Triet, Arthur Harari
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