10 great puzzle films

Created by Igor_Brynner.

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“What’s in the box?” wails Brad Pitt’s panicked detective to Kevin Spacey’s implacable serial killer at the end of David Fincher’s pitch-black thriller Se7en (1995). Soon enough Pitt, and the audience, learn the horrific truth about Spacey’s special delivery. It’s testament to the enduring power of mysteries – the who-, why- and how-dunnits – that we always need to know, no matter how awful the solution might be. And those that can still pull one over on game and experienced armchair sleuths – Rian Johnson’s Knives Out (2019) and its upcoming sequel are fine recent examples – are valuable indeed.

Of course, those are just one type of ‘puzzle’ movie. Some don’t so much contain a riddle to solve as much as the film itself is constructed as an enigma that defies easy answers, or any definite answer at all. This could be the interlocking double timeframes of Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000), which tries to replicate its amnesiac protagonist’s short-term memory lapses. Or the playful narrative diversions and roundelay of shifting identities in certain Jacques Rivette films.

Peter Greenaway’s breakthrough feature, The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982), appeared 40 years ago and immediately put its own deft, acerbic headspin on British period films. It tells of the titular, entitled 17th-century draughtsman hired to make 12 drawings of a landowner’s country estate by his wife. In return, and in addition to his fee, she will satisfy his pleasures. But that’s only the start of a series of covert transactions, concealed vantage points and hidden motivations to be teased out by the viewer from Greenaway’s precise tableaux.

The director would go on to make even more oblique, enigmatic work (often structured around a particular key or code), one of which features below in a selection of cinema’s most beautifully, often hypnotically, baffling brainteasers.