Suspense movies where spectators have the solution to the mystery

All of them?

You always know more than the protagonist. Even in The Bone Collector and Seven there are a few scenes from the killers POV. 

I guess Psycho would qualify in a sense. We're always one step ahead of Arbogast and subsequently ahead of Sam and Lila.

Talented Mr. Ripley
Match Point
Rope

Silence of the Lambs

RATZ ... I was going to be the brilliant one who posted about Columbo ! Foiled again !


So having gone back to the drawing board …


ROPE perhaps ? Jep Gambardella

WE know who dunnit and why but will they get away with it ?

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Edit .. I read thru too fast the first time and see that Rope was already suggested … argh ! 

Jep Gambardella

Interestingly enough, the mystery plot in which we know the killer from the beginning and the interest is how he’ll be caught is fairly common in detective-stories; the modern iteration of it was invented by a writer named R. Austin Freeman in a collection called The Singing Bone. It’s sometimes called “the inverted detective story” and, more often, the “howatchem” (after “whodunit”). The format was adopted by Freeman’s chief literary disciple, the similarly-named Freeman Wills Crofts, who used it in many novels. (His work is a major influence on Columbo.) It didn’t really catch on all that much during the ‘30s and ‘40s, detective fiction’s “golden age,” though, largely because of the whodunit puzzle-plot from Christie and Carr, inter alia.

I think I’d distinguish the howatchem proper from psychological suspense, which appears in something Malice Aforethought, by “Francis Iles” (pen name of mystery-writer Anthony Berkeley Cox). In both sub-genres, you know the killer from the beginning, but the latter is concerned with his character and motivation, while the former is concerned with how he’ll be caught. (Of course, some works—Dial ‘M’ for Murder being a prime example—intermingle the two.)

Some of them are halfway between the howatchem and the whodunit, too: have you seen Fracture (2007)? Great movie—you know Hopkins is the killer from the beginning, but you don’t know how, and you have to follow ADA Ryan Gosling as he tries to prove Hopkins guilty. It’d probably fit this category.

Many Hitchcocks work this way (cf. his famous surprise-suspense dichotomy). One I rarely see mentioned is Vertigo, because you don’t know the solution from the beginning, but you definitely know it before Jimmy Stewart does.

And watch Columbo! It’s great. You’ll probably love it if you liked Monk.