Film

Deathtrap

Sidney Lumet's gleefully theatrical adaptation of Ira Levin's hit play traps a washed-up playwright, his wife, and a gifted student in one Connecticut study with a manuscript worth killing for. Michael Caine and Christopher Reeve play the room like a chess match, and the film keeps pulling the rug out from under you — twice, at least. Stagey by design, and proud of it.

TMDb rating6.7

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Knives Out2019

Rian Johnson takes the same puzzle-box pleasure Deathtrap trades in and updates it with a starry cast, a genuinely satisfying solution, and real anger under the wit — the modern gold standard for this kind of plot.

But If you've already watched it twice, the surprises won't land as surprises again.

Knives Out poster

Clue1985

Broader and sillier but working the same room, same body, same rotating cast of suspects overplaying every line — a single house full of theatrical performance and murder.

But The comedy is pitched for slapstick, not the slow-burn dread Deathtrap works so hard to build.

Clue poster

Gosford Park2001

Robert Altman turns the country-house murder mystery into a study of class and performance, scripted with the density of a good stage thriller and an ensemble to match.

But It's a slow, crowded ensemble piece — patience is required before the mystery even properly starts.

Gosford Park poster

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Sleuth1972

Same architecture, same DNA — and Michael Caine played the young interloper here a decade before playing the older manipulator in Deathtrap, so watching them back to back is like watching an actor argue with his own past.

Anthony Shaffer's original two-hander thriller is the blueprint Deathtrap is clearly working from — a house, a game, and two men trying to out-manoeuvre each other in front of the audience.

But It's talkier and more stagebound even than Deathtrap — almost nothing happens outside two men and a room.

Sleuth poster
More like this (8)

House of Games1987

David Mamet's directorial debut is pure con-artist theatre: clipped dialogue, escalating deceptions, and a protagonist who thinks she's smarter than the game she's playing.

But Mamet's stylised, staccato dialogue is an acquired taste — some find it mannered rather than menacing.

House of Games poster

Malice1993no page yet

A thriller built entirely on the pleasure of realising you've been lied to by the film itself, with a mid-movie monologue that rewrites everything you thought you knew.

But The plotting is more shameless than clever in places — it wants you to admire the con more than believe it.

A Simple Favor2018

Paul Feig grafts pitch-black comedy onto a genuinely twisty missing-persons plot, with Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively having enormous fun with unreliable narration.

But It swerves hard between comedy and thriller — some viewers find the gear changes jarring rather than fun.

A Simple Favor poster

Murder on the Orient Express2017

Lavish, star-stuffed, old-fashioned whodunit pleasure, with Branagh's Poirot working a locked-room puzzle in the grand Christie tradition.

But It's polished rather than surprising — most viewers will have met this plot, or something close to it, before.

Murder on the Orient Express poster

The Last of Sheila1973

Written by Stephen Sondheim and Anthony Perkins for their own puzzle-obsessed friends, this is a genuinely vicious, endlessly clever whodunit among Hollywood insiders.

But It's talky and unapologetically catty — the plot rewards close attention it doesn't always earn.

The Last of Sheila poster

Dead Again1991no page yet

Kenneth Branagh's stylish noir throwback about past lives and buried guilt shares the same appetite for reversals, shot with real Hitchcockian flourish.

But The past-life premise asks for more suspension of disbelief than Deathtrap ever does.

Wild Things1998

Strip away the wood-panelled study and the same structural engine — a plan within a plan within a plan, staged for an audience that thinks it already knows the ending — turns up in a Florida teen noir instead of a Connecticut drawing room.

A trashy, sun-bleached erotic thriller running the exact same con as Deathtrap — fake deaths, shifting alliances, a plot that keeps re-revealing itself — with a lot more skin and a lot less Broadway.

But It's genuinely trashy, unashamedly so, with none of Deathtrap's wit or craft to dress it up.

Wild Things poster

F for Fake1973

Deathtrap's whole plot turns on stolen authorship and performed identity; Welles' film is a real-life essay on exactly that fraud, narrated by a man who was himself a great and gleeful liar about his own work.

Orson Welles' essay-film about art forgers and hoaxers is playful, self-implicating, and obsessed with the same question Deathtrap dramatises: who really owns a piece of work once authorship becomes performance.

But It's a documentary-collage, not a plotted thriller — no murder, no twist ending, just Welles gleefully messing with the idea of truth.

F for Fake poster

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