For Fans of Only Murders in the Building

Hitchcock's 1954 classic defined the voyeur-as-detective premise that Only Murders inherits. A man confined to his apartment watches his neighbors through a camera lens and convinces himself he has witnessed a murder. The film works as suspense, as romantic comedy, and as a meditation on spectatorship. Selena Gomez's character even echoes Grace Kelly's energy: young, glamorous, more capable than anyone gives her credit for. If you have not revisited Rear Window recently, the film feels fresher than ever in an era of surveillance culture and armchair true-crime fanatics.

Rian Johnson created Poker Face as a deliberate inverted mystery in the Columbo tradition: you see the crime first, then watch Natasha Lyonne's Charlie Cale figure it out through instinct rather than deduction. The show shares Only Murders' pleasure in genre-awareness, in a protagonist who is both deeply sincere and surrounded by absurdity, and in the confidence that a great cast of weekly guest stars can carry as much weight as the lead. It is also one of the sharpest pieces of TV writing in recent years.

If the appeal of Only Murders is partly its faith in deeply strange, deeply specific characters working through a mystery together, Disco Elysium is the game that takes that same commitment furthest. You play a detective who has drunk himself into amnesia and must reconstruct both the murder and his own identity through conversation, failure, and an internal chorus of competing psychological voices. It is funny, bleak, politically serious, and structurally unlike almost anything else. The mystery is almost secondary to the character.