There’s a particular movie-watching mood for slow-burnmysteries, and it’s no surprise that it goes hand in hand with autumn, a time for smoldering embers in the fireplace, chilly walks on crunchy leaves where you could swear there is someone behind you. Slow-burn mysteries can happen across genres, too: tense film noir, thrillers that weasel their way under your skin, suspense-filled dramas where you’re waiting for something, although you aren’t quite sure what.
These 10 enigmatic films may or may not have ambiguous endings, they may leave you thinking about them for weeks (or months) on end, and they’ve all got a slow and subtle build-up that satisfies in a way that a faster-paced movie just can’t fulfill.
10The Third Man (1949)
The cinematic dream team of director Carol Reed, author and screenwriter Graham Greene, and actors Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles came together to make thisquintessential slow-burn film noirin 1949. It appears on countless lists as one of, if notthebest, British film ever made. Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) has just arrived in Vienna, where his friend Harry Lime (Welles) has promised him a job in the days following WWII.
But he finds out quickly that Lime has just been hit by a car and killed, in what immediately seems like more than just an unfortunate hit-and-run. Martins looks for witnesses, and ends up falling for Lime’s girlfriend, Anna, all the while uncovering information about Lime’s black market dealings. Post-war Vienna is full of shadows and secrets, and Martins is chasing the truth, just out of reach around every corner.
9The Vanishing (Spoorloos) (1988)
How far would you go to know the truth? That’s the question asked by this chilling 1988 Dutch film. Rex’s girlfriend, Saskia, disappeared without a roadside service station in the middle of their vacation. Three years later, Rex (Gene Bervoets) finds himself unable to move on, even trying to rope his new girlfriend into helping him search for Saskia. He’s received invitations to meet from someone purporting to be Saskia’s kidnapper, but the person never shows up when they say they will.
But after putting out yet another public appeal, Rex meets Raymond (Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu), a man who promises to reveal Saskia’s fate to Rex if he just goes with him. He tells Rex about his family, and how he realized he was a sociopath in his youth. Rex must decide whether to trust this man, who confesses that he set out to commit the worst crime that he could.
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8The Secret in Their Eyes (El secreto de sus ojos) (2009)
Set in the 1970s, Ricardo Darin stars in this twisting 2009 mystery that ended up as Argentina’s second-highest-grossing film ever. Darin plays judiciary agent Benjamin Espósito, who is working with his small team to track down the man who raped and killed Liliana Colotto de Morales, going so far as to promise her husband Ricardo that he will bring the perpetrator to justice. But the investigation doesn’t go smoothly, and finding out that Liliana had a stalker only snarls the case up further.
Mistakes are made, and the case is closed, only to be reopened a few years later when Espósito runs into Ricardo again, and the two track the stalker to a football game. Every time Espósito gets close, though, there’s some sort of interference, with the government, hitmen, and even the stalker’s mother throwing up roadblocks. Espósito comes back to the case numerous times until the final, explosive reveal.
7Notorious (1946)
Hitchcock’s classic 1946 noir burns slowly with romance, mystery, and high-stakes espionage. T.R. Devlin (Cary Grant) is a federal agent who needs to infiltrate a group of Nazis hiding out in Brazil, and to do that he needs the help of Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman), whose father was a Nazi spy. She’s reluctant, but he’s persuasive, and the two are falling in love when Alicia gets her assignment: to seduce a former friend of her father’s, Alex Sebastian (a sinister Claude Rains). This throws a wrench into Devlin and Alicia’s burgeoning relationship, with miscommunications and hurt feelings stacking up until Alicia agrees to marry Sebastian.
Alicia and Devlin uncover Sebastian’s dark machinations, by which point Sebastian is onto them, and Alicia is put in serious danger. It’s a wonderful slow-burn plot, made all the more intense by the scorching chemistry between Bergman and Grant, exemplified in a scene that draws out a kiss between the two to get around theHays Code three-second rule.
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6Caché (2005)
Michael Haneke is known for films that explore brutalityin different ways:Funny GamesandBenny’s Videowith violence,The Piano Teacherwith sexuality,Amourwith aging.Cachétackles the Algerian War, and colonialism, and the things we remember and the things we forget. Wealthy Georges and Anne (Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche) receive a videotape that is both innocuous and terrifying: it’s just footage of their home. A second video is of an unsettling child’s drawing, and a third is of Georges’ childhood home.
Georges thinks he knows where the tapes are coming from, and it involves his parents’ thwarted adoption of an Algerian boy named Majid, and Georges was the one who ensured that it didn’t happen. The film is a master class in the slow build of tension, a tension heightened by its very ambiguity.
5The Conversation (1974)
Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 nail-biter stars Gene Hackman as surveillance expert Harry Caul. For Caul, life, and work don’t have much of a dividing line, and he puts as much into his own privacy as he puts into invading the privacy of the people he surveils. A shadowy client has Caul and his colleagues record the conversation of a couple, which turns out to be them discussing their fear that they are being watched, and may be in danger.
A devout Catholic, Caul is already struggling with guilt over a previous job that resulted in three deaths, and isn’t sure he wants to get the tapes to the client. As he investigates further, he gets more and more paranoid, no longer certain he can believe what he’s seeing. It’s the kind of movie that will have you holding your breath right along with Caul.
4Burning (2018)
Lee Chang-dong’scritically acclaimed 2018 thrillerpulls elements from short stories by two slow-burn masters, Haruki Murakami and William Faulkner. The three main characters are caught in something like a love triangle, but not exactly: odd job worker Lee Jong-su (Yoo Ah-in), his old classmate Hae-mi (Jeon Jong-seo), and Ben (Steven Yeun), an inscrutable young man that Hae-mi meets while traveling. Jong-su has feelings for Hae-mi, and doesn’t trust Ben, who’s evasive about his past and burns down greenhouses for fun.
After receiving a strange phone call from Hae-mi, Jong-su finds that her phone is cut off, her apartment is empty, and her cat is gone. He suspects Ben, and begins to hang around outside his apartment. The slow, quiet film builds to a thick suspense by the end, but the abrupt final act does nothing to solve the pervasive feeling of mystery that hangs over it.
3Rear Window (1954)
Hitchcock’s classic 1954 mystery starts off almost as a lighthearted comedy with the introduction of “Jeff” Jefferies (James Stewart), a photographer laid up in his apartment with a broken leg and a wheelchair. Bored during a heat wave, he amuses himself by looking out his back window, spying on his neighbors, whom he gives nicknames to pass the time. His usual visitors are his girlfriend, Lisa (Grace Kelly) and his nurse, Stella (Thelma Ritter).
Alone one night, Jeff hears a woman scream and a commotion, followed the next day by seeing his salesman neighbor carrying a number of suitcases out of his apartment, and no sign of his bedridden wife. Comedy turns dark as Jeff is sure there’s been a murder, and enlists an old friend and a police detective to investigate. Jeff’s position as an immobilized observer of the action renders him helpless, and ramps up the anxiety for the audience.
2Blood Simple (1984)
Joel and Ethan Coen’s debut feature still stands as one of their best, a dark and pulpy neo-noir starringFrances McDormandas Abby, a Texas woman having an affair with a bartender named Ray (John Getz), whose boss is her husband, Marty (Dan Hedaya). Marty has hired a private detective, Visser (a sleazy M. Emmet Walsh), to take pictures, and when the affair comes to light, Marty pays Visser to kill them both. Marty heads out of town to give himself an alibi, and upon his return, Visser delivers photos of the dead couple. But Visser has some secrets up his sleeve, and the film turns into a game of cat and mouse, with distrust and violence coming from every angle.
1Memories of Murder (2003)
Parasitedirector Bong Joon-ho directed this South Korean thriller in 2003. It stars Song Kang-ho (who also starred inParasiteand other Bong-directed films) as Park Doo-man, a small-town police detective who’s unprepared when two women are murdered locally. He and his partner mishandle evidence, bully and beat a suspect, and generally do just about everything wrong.
The atmospheric film captures the encroaching desperation of the detectives as they lose respect in the community, along with any hopes of a conviction. The slow pace of country life is disrupted on all fronts as they deal with what turned out to be South Korea’s first serial killer, and like so many excellent slow-burn films, the last scene is a real kicker.
