this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2024
106 points (96.5% liked)

Movies

7474 readers
61 users here now

Lemmy

Welcome to Movies, a community for discussing movies, film news, box office, and more! We want this to be a place for members to feel safe to discuss and share everything they love about movies and movie related things. Please feel free to take part and help our community grow!


Related Communities:

!books@lemmy.world - Discussing books and book-related things.

!comicbooks@lemmy.world - A place to discuss comic books of all types.

!marvelstudios@lemmy.world - LW's home for all things MCU.


While posting and commenting in this community, you must abide by the Lemmy.World Terms of Service: https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/

  1. Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, ableist, or advocating violence will be removed.

  2. Be civil: disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally insult others.

  3. Spam, self promotion, trolling, and bots are not allowed

  4. Shitposts and memes are allowed until they prove to be a problem.

    Regarding spoilers; Please put "(Spoilers)" in the title of your post if you anticipate spoilers, as we do not currently have a spoiler tag available. If your post contains an image that could be considered a spoiler, please mark the thread as NSFW so the image gets blurred. As far as how long to wait until the post is no longer a spoiler, please just use your best judgement. Everyone has a different idea on this, so we don't want to make any hard limits.

    Please use spoiler tags whenever commenting a spoiler in a non-spoiler thread. Most of the Lemmy clients don't support this but we want to get into the habit as clients will be supporting in the future.

Failure to follow these guidelines will result in your post/comment being removed and/or more severe actions. All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users. We ask that the users report any comment or post that violates the rules, and to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

It’s not a whodunit because the movie begins with you “knowing” whodunit, and then ends with the twist being actually “no one” dunit. Never at any point in the movie does the viewer wonder “whodunit”, which is literally the only requisite for a movie to be classified as a whodunit.

Two bonus points can be awarded for how bad it is as well. The first being that the answer to who the real villain is, is the only character in the movie who obviously presents from the start as the villain. The whole twist is “You thought the cartoonishly villainous person was an obvious red herring and that we have a much more clever villain in store, but nope. They just actually are the villain”. The second being that the ending monologue posits that Martha is not a killer because “She’s too good of a nurse”, when in reality she’s a horrible nurse with zero attention to detail and her horrible incompetence is the only reason she isn’t the killer.

I can’t think of any other whodunits where the twist is “Like a whodunit, but you aren’t even aware there is a mystery until after it’s solved, and the secret villain of the movie turned out to just be the person we introduced to you as the villain in the first act.”

[–] DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

I'm sorry to tell you this but:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/whodunit

The mystery in question doesn't necessarily need to be who is the murderer, as in this case it is largely "who is blackmailing the nurse?" Even "how does Blanc puzzle it out" qualifies it as a detective story itself.

It's fair if you want a stricter definition but you are going to run into pushback on a personal definition.

[–] EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world 0 points 1 week ago

I’m sorry to burst your bubble but:

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/whodunit

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/whodunit

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/whodunit#:~:text=(hud%CA%8Cn%C9%AAt%20)%20also%20whodunnit,%5Binformal%5D

The mystery in question specifically refers to a crime, usually a murder specifically and who committed it. Hence the “who” in “whodunit”. Thats why they don’t call it a “Whoisit” or “howdoeshe”