Deathtrap (1982)
Directed by Sidney Lumet
A Broadway playwright puts murder in his plan to take credit for a student's script.
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What critics compared Deathtrap to
In the same flavor as Clue , Murder on the Orient Express , and Deathtrap , you have a murder, a collection of characters, each of whom has a reason to have done it, and a sleuth investigation on the job.
Writer-director Rian Johnson, still being nerd-roasted for his smash-hit Star Wars installment, The Last Jedi, happily acknowledges his influences in constructing Knives Out—primarily Agatha Christie novels and the movies made from them (Death on the Nile, Evil Under the Sun), as well as pictures like Gosford Park and the super-tricky Deathtrap.
Occasionally, a high-concept take on the whodunit will make a splash, as in Joseph L Mankiewicz’s adaptation of the cat-and-mouse two-hander Sleuth (1972), Sidney Lumet’s version of the mind-screwy meta-mystery Deathtrap (1982), or Johnathan Lynn’s manic screwball cult phenomenon Clue (1985).
Structurally, Johnson borrows from Sleuth and Deathtrap, two movies (both based on plays) that spring huge surprises every 30 minutes or so, defying the audience's presumptions.
The point, on the surface, is that Rian Johnson has given us a delicious mystery that riffs on Clue, Deathtrap, Columbo, Murder She Wrote, and even a little And Then There Were None.
Writer-director Rian Johnson ’s smart, wickedly funny whodunit plays like a game of Clue come to life—it's a jumped-up Agatha Christie thriller, a throwback to fiendishly clever puzzlers like Sleuth and Deathtrap, and a scathing satire of the hypocrisy and racism of the Trump era.
Actors who try to shake off a clean-cut image risk looking gimmicky or insincere – think of Julie Andrews going topless in SOB, or Christopher Reeve kissing Michael Caine in Deathtrap.
The genre was probably invented 40 years ago, when Ira Levin wrote “Deathtrap” (or maybe eight years before that, when Anthony Shaffer wrote “Sleuth”), but it got kicked into the age of head-trip technology with David Fincher’s “The Game” (1997), in which the ever-shifting reality that surrounded the Michael Douglas character reflected the prospect of life being hijacked by the morph-happy consciousness of video games.