10 Best Whodunit Films From Unusual Genres

1. A Perfect Getaway (Vacation Thriller)

Apparently the title for this movie is so misleading, critic Roger Ebert went into it expecting it to be a romantic comedy. Boy was he in for a surprise! And it’s no wonder, as the two main leads are Steve Zahn and Timothy Olyphant, who at the time had both done their fair share of comedies. What viewers like Ebert didn’t expect was for A Perfect Getaway to be a surprisingly well-executed take on the whodunit.

Zahn and Milla Jovovich play a couple honeymooning in Hawaii who join up with two other couples for a hiking trip. Olyphant and Kiele Sanchez play another couple who are seasoned hikers/extreme vacationers. The third couple are listless vagabonds who come off as low-level scam artists, played by Mary Shelton and a pre-Thor (but still looking fine as hell) Chris Hemsworth.

As the couples embark on their journey, they are given word that a manhunt is underway on the other islands after another couple has been found murdered. As the group make their way through the jungle terrain, we begin to see holes in each of these couple’s stories, leading the viewer (and the other couples) to start suspecting that someone or ones on this couple’s retreat are in fact the murderers in question.

A lot of people overlooked this film, probably because of the misleading title, but it employs what is perhaps one of the most clever whodunit plot twists in recent memory.