If you look for long movies, you’ll see some genres represented more than others. Namely, historical dramas tend to get the epic treatment, if you look at the likes of Lawrence of Arabia, or the big films that are set in historical times, but not necessarily based on real people, like Gone with the Wind and Seven Samurai. Mystery films, though, tend to keep things on the shorter side of things runtime-wise.
Two hours, or slightly on either side of that amount of time, might be the sweet spot for a mystery movie, yet some are also epic-length. They make for unusual and distinctive watches, with the ones below being some of the most notable and lengthy ones, all exceeding 2.5 hours in length. Serial films and miniseries aren’t included, with the focus here being on movies that were screened theatrically. And some of these aren’t full-fledged mysteries, but if there are mystery elements, and “mystery” is listed as a genre on the film’s Letterboxd page, then they can be featured below.
10
‘Eyes Wide Shut’ (1999)
159 Minutes
With his final film, Stanley Kubrick went out weird and provocative. Well, particularly weird and provocative. Eyes Wide Shut is his most mystery-heavy movie, even if 2001: A Space Odyssey might be even more confounding (at least before you watch it a second or third time), and The Shining might also be mysterious with its ending… but more of a horror film than a mystery one.
Anyway, Eyes Wide Shut is about a husband who suspects his wife might be unfaithful, and so he investigates things, gets in over his head, and starts to grapple with the idea of whether he should be unfaithful, too. There are so many more questions raised than answered, but in a way that works and doesn’t really frustrate. Also, some people have arguably over-analyzed Eyes Wide Shut, with conspiracies regarding what Kubrick was trying to say (and why he might’ve put his life in danger by “exposing” things he did), but that’s a whole other story. A long, whole other story.
9
‘Anatomy of a Murder’ (1959)
161 Minutes
Anatomy of a Murder is, without exaggeration, one of the best courtroom dramas of all time. It’s also one of the longer ones, but it does earn that runtime with the complex case at the heart of its plot, and all the characters who play a part in that trial. Certain people are shady, or might not be telling the whole truth, and that keeps the courtroom and audience alike in the dark and guessing.
Not every courtroom drama counts as a mystery film, since Judgment at Nuremberg, from around the same time (and quite a bit longer, at over three hours in length), is more of a historical drama about a real-life case. Anatomy of a Murder keeps things more thrilling, arguably, because it’s more about finding the truth, or a truth, and it does really hold up as a mystery film of its era (or hell, maybe any era).
8
‘Watchmen’ (2009)
163 Minutes
It is a superhero movie of sorts, but Watchmen also works as a large-scale mystery film, since a big part of the plot here involves ex-heroes getting murdered for some unknown reason, and by an unknown individual or group. There’s quite a bit of paranoia while the alternate world of the film is also falling apart, making Watchmen bleak and dystopian.
It’s far from the only noteworthy superhero film of the 21st century to deconstruct the genre, yet it does so especially well. Also, the source material did it a good deal of time before it was cool, and the graphic novel version of Watchmen is admittedly a little better and more striking, though this film adaptation is better than some give it credit for.
7
‘Solaris’ (1972)
167 Minutes
While Solaris is primarily a science fiction movie, it’s also classifiable as a mystery one since it has a great deal of stuff going on that doesn’t make a lot of sense at first, and only makes a little sense in time. Speaking of time, you’ve got a lot of it here, with the movie not being far off three hours all up, and since it’s slowly paced, this does feel a bit longer than 167 minutes.
Still, Solaris impresses on a visual front, and as an experience, so long as you’re willing to be patient and think about it more than you might have to for your average sci-fi/mystery movie. It’s about a strange psychological condition affecting people living on a space station, at least initially, since there’s a lot more on this movie’s mind than just that. It’s overwhelming, or would be, if it weren’t slow enough to give you quite a lot of time to think about the whole experience.
6
‘The Batman’ (2022)
177 Minutes
The Batman is certainly the longest theatrical release centered on Batman (there is Zack Snyder’s Justice League, which has him there prominently, but it’s not a solo Batman movie), and it’s also possibly the one that highlights the mystery/detective side of things more than any other, at least of the live-action ones. There is still some action and spectacle here, but it doesn’t offer as much as you might expect; not as much compared to all the other theatrically released Batman movies.
And that’s okay, since the slow-burn nature of The Batman is great. It stays largely engaging for almost three hours, and also, the atmosphere here is undeniably strong. It’s easy to liken it to an epic-length Se7en kind of film, just with Batman there, and… well, yeah, it’s better than that might sound. It’s pretty great.
5
‘Inland Empire’ (2006)
180 Minutes
Most David Lynch movies have some degree of mystery to them for sure, but then Inland Empire is one that goes the extra mile, to put it mildly. Summarizing the plot here proves particularly hard to do, but as broadly as possible, it’s about an actress experiencing her life falling apart and/or her psyche deteriorating because of a variety of things that are all hard to define or assess.
It’s a nightmare, but by design. Further, Inland Empire is challenging because of how long it is, clocking in at exactly three hours, and because of how it’s filmed. The choice to give this such a grainy and aggressively digital look might well be the most mysterious part of all, or at least you could argue that. It’s possible to understand most of Mulholland Drive after a couple of viewings, but Inland Empire is a much tougher cinematic nut to crack.
4
‘A Fugitive from the Past’ (1965)
183 Minutes
There are some other Japanese films from the 1950s and 1960s that are a good deal more approachable (and famous) than A Fugitive from the Past, but this one is great, so long as you’re up for something long and rather dense on a narrative front. It’s about a heist that led to two of the three robbers ending up dead, which prompts a big investigation while there’s a possible third fugitive still at large.
It’s definitely a police procedural kind of film, but on a scale that you don’t often see, since there aren’t a great many truly epic (in scale and runtime) movies with this sort of premise. You could compare it a little with High and Low, another Japanese film from the 1960s about a police investigation, but A Fugitive from the Past is indeed longer, and also maybe a bit more offbeat and unusual, too.
3
‘The Hateful Eight’ (2015)
188 Minutes
This one’s tricky, because The Hateful Eight has different runtimes with slightly different cuts, including the full-length one with an intermission built in. That intermission and an overture are the main reasons it’s longer than the 168-minute-long version, but either way, you’ve got a long mystery film that’s also a Western, and it’s one of the bloodiest of all time, regarding its placement/status within either genre.
The film involves eight shady and largely terrible people getting stuck inside one location during a blizzard, and then various people are suspicious and, eventually, violent toward each other. Everything is super stretched out in The Hateful Eight, in an effort to make it as suspenseful and bleak as possible, and in that sense, it’s largely a success, even if Quentin Tarantino has certainly made better films before.
2
‘Legend of the Mountain’ (1979)
192 Minutes
If you’re familiar with King Hu, it’s probably because of the influential and (still) pretty great martial arts movies he directed, including Dragon Inn and the epic-length A Touch of Zen. Another epic-length film of his was Legend of the Mountain, but it’s the kind of thing where if you go in expecting martial arts action, you’ll be disappointed, since Legend of the Mountain is just not that kind of movie, even if it was directed by King Hu.
Instead, this is more of a slow-burn supernatural horror movie, but one where the horror elements take their time emerging. That’s because it’s also about a scholar uncovering strange things while studying some mysterious Buddhist texts, which is where the mystery side of things comes in. It’s a strange and sometimes quite beautiful film, ultimately being worth sitting through and then sitting with, even if it takes a fair amount of time to do such things.
1
‘Out 1’ (1971)
743 Minutes
Perhaps the only movie here more difficult to summarize than Inland Empire is Out 1, largely because it’s more than four times as long and it has even less of a definable plot. One can imagine Lynch knows what Inland Empire is about, at least, but Out 1 feels like it was almost entirely improvised, and they made the whole thing up as it went along… and then they just kept on letting it go on and on.
There are two acting groups doing some stuff, and then two independent people hovering around those groups, trying to uncover some kind of shadowy organization. Whether the organization has anything to do with the actors, or even exists at all… eh, you have to watch all 12 and a half hours of Out 1 to find out, or to not find out, because it’s that much of a mystery film that you can’t even be sure there are going to be many (or even any) answers.
Out 1
- Release Date
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December 15, 1990
- Runtime
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743 minutes
- Director
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Jacques Rivette
- Writers
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Jacques Rivette, Suzanne Schiffman
