So I saw the movie Clue for like the 10th time recently. Love that movie, Tim Curry was perfect and the rest of the cast was great too. I liked the whole mystery aspect of the thing but one thing has always bugged me about it. It bills itself as a mystery, and of course the game is a mystery puzzle where you try to solve a murder, but in fact the characters know a lot more than the audience. There’s simply no way to “solve” the mystery until you get to the end of the movie because the clues are obvious only to the characters themselves
That got me wondering, are there any movies where all of the clues necessary to solve the mystery is laid out for the audience to actually solve? It would have to be something where the characters are not privy to any extra knowledge that is necessary to solve the mystery (but the knowledge may be used to help, of course, and to make a better movie)
Spoilers for the Usual Suspects below:
What bugged me about the film was that even though it was brilliantly constructed, there is no way for the viewer to figure out the mystery of Keyser Soze beforehand. We are only treated to Verbal’s version of events and without seeing the names on the wall of the police station he used as part of his story, there’s no way to determine if he was telling the truth or not
I guess I’m kind of looking for things like the old Encyclopedia Brown book series that I used to read as a kid. In those short stories, the main character deduces clues from the plot like dialogue, evidence, etc. and figures out the mystery by the end of it. However, all of the clues are written for the reader to catch as well. They were quite impressive to a young Yog Sosoth of only one or two vigintillions of years old. I guess I’m looking for a movie version of that type of mystery