If you ask the average crime fan why they watch thrillers and mysteries, they will probably say it’s for the build-up to the big reveal. It’s fun to test yourself to see if you can collect the clues and crack the case before the professionals on the screen.
Plus, the adrenaline that comes with it is such a rush.
If a movie decides to reveal the identity of the killer at the center of its plot before the detectives or investigating characters figure it out, it’s a huge risk. It can be a total letdown if not properly thought out.
However, there are a few movies that have managed to get away with it. The key is using that reveal to build to something larger and even more unexpected.
These reverse whodunnits can still sustain our adrenaline, but only if the balance is struck exactly right. So here are three classic crime movies that get away with revealing the killer early on!
SE7EN (1995)
SE7EN follows a retiring detective named Somerset (Morgan Freeman) and his rookie partner, Mills (Brad Pitt), as they’re assigned to a case where people are being murdered in reference to the seven deadly sins.
SE7EN is brutal, bleak, and unlike anything else. Still, to this day, there have been few movies like it, which makes sense that its writer, Andrew Kevin Walker, and its director, David Fincher, would want to do something unimaginable like throwing an absolute wrench into things about two-thirds of the way through the movie by making the killer reveal himself.
Just past the mid-point, a strange man who’s never been fully seen before (Kevin Spacey) walks into the police station and identifies himself as John Doe, the killer behind the recent attacks. At first, it’s unbelievable, because thus far John has only managed to carry out killings tied to five of the seven sins.
It’s so easy it almost seems fake, though it's not. John Doe is the million-dollar man.
But what comes in the last third of SE7EN is beyond imagination, and the payoff is far better than what would have come from Somerset and Mills chasing down Doe themselves.
SE7EN is successful in revealing the killer because the identity of the killer isn’t the reveal, it’s his later actions that are. Actions that can only happen after he is made known.
John Doe could be anyone, honestly, which is probably how he earned his name.
The Silence of The Lambs (1991)
The Silence of The Lambs is another iconic crime film. In it, a young FBI trainee named Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) is asked to interview infamous serial killer Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) to gain the insight needed to crack a new case.
The film gives away the identity of the murderer well before its midpoint. Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine), the murderer Clarice’s boss hopes to track down, is a man who kills women and skins them alive.
Quite early in the film, he's shown luring the daughter of a US Senator into his van to be his next victim. Throughout the movie, we continue to see flashes of the dungeonous lair where he works.
While this is a bold reveal, it’s one that makes sense. Buffalo Bill’s identity isn’t as important as his motive—the reason and the psychology behind why he is murdering women is more a mystery than who he is himself.
It also helps that Hannibal Lecter’s character does a ton of heavy lifting in the second act, escaping from the facility where he has been relocated to as a part of a deal he made in exchange for information on Buffalo Bill.
And even though we know who Buffalo Bill is, we don’t necessarily know where he is. It’s this information, along with information furnished by Lecter before he goes on a total killing spree, that helps Clarice crack the case.
It’s also these factors that leave plenty of threads to be unraveled throughout the entirety of the film. While we know who the killer is and what he looks like early on, that doesn’t mean there’s not plenty to keep our adrenaline pumping and our wheels spinning throughout.
I Saw the Devil (2010)
In the 2010 Korean thriller I Saw the Devil, a school bus driver named Jang Kyung-chul (Choi Min-sik) pulls over to help a woman with car trouble on a cold, snowy night. But the tone of the encounter changes quickly when he decides to beat the woman within inches of her life.
Kyung-chul takes the woman to his home where he violently dismembers her without realizing that, in the process, her engagement ring has rolled away into a storm drain. When parts of her body turn up in other drains around town after Kyung-chul has dumped them, the ring is also found, and it just so happens that the victim was engaged to an agent in the Korean CIA.
I Saw the Devil reveals the killer almost immediately, because uncovering the killer’s identity isn’t the point of this movie as it is with SE7EN or The Silence of The Lambs. I Saw the Devil represents a different kind of crime movie entirely—the kind where the point is revenge.
Kim Soo-hyun (Lee Byung-hun), the fiancé of the murdered woman, vows to avenge his dead girlfriend, planting a tracker in Kyung-chul that leads to a vicious chase. What follows is merciless, and the brutality in this movie is one of the rare cases on par with SE7EN.
Kyung-chul is so awful that the revenge exacted by Kim Soo-hyun is equally as satisfying, as if there was a mystery we had solved ourselves.
These movies serve to prove that it’s possible to give up the bad guy early on. However, they also show the keys to making that strategy an effective choice.
As it is with SE7EN, there must be a reveal greater than the reveal of the killer himself.
As it is with The Silence of The Lambs, there must be mystery layered into motive instead of identity, and an unpredictable second storyline is also a great help.
And with I Saw The Devil, it’s clear from very early on that the mystery isn’t the murderer, but mystery is in the hunt.
While they break tradition, each of these movies is a master class. And because they break tradition, each of these movies has held up in the decades since their release.
