Alice gets home after a long day. Just as she makes herself comfortable, the doorbell rings. Suddenly the scene jumps to Bob and Claire, who are talking about how they haven't seen Alice this morning. Suddenly the audience realizes that it's the next morning, and we never found out who was at the door. Will Bob and Claire now have to investigate Alice's murder? Or is it all a Red Herring?
Often part of a Cold Opening or used as a way of setting up a case of Not Quite Dead.
This has become almost a staple of murder mysteries, especially in Live-Action TV shows like Diagnosis: Murder and Monk.
Examples:
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Advertising
- Discussed in a late 2013/early 2014 commercial for the New York Lottery which asks what you will think of when you don't have to think about money. We see a man driving an expensive car and thinking "If you rip the last page out of a mystery novel, does it make it a better mystery?"
Anime
- The climax of the second chapter of The Garden of Sinners has Shiki about to kill Mikiya. However, it then skips to Shiki in a coma with Mikiya visiting her in the hospital. While the fifth chapter does give us some idea as to what happened, the viewer doesn't get the full story until the seventh and final chapter.
- Neon Genesis Evangelion: Who killed Kaji?
Film
- Grindhouse:
- Death Proof, which has a 'missing reel' that makes it ambiguous as to whether Butterfly gives Stuntman Mike a promised lap dance. This was inspired by an unintentional version of the trope that Quentin Tarantino's encountered while viewing an Italian crime movie. A missing reel of the film made it ambiguous as to whether Oliver Reed had slept with the girl. In the scenes afterwards, Reed says he did, but the girl says he didn't.
- The other half of the feature, Planet Terror, played it gloriously straight with a reel that was never shot. The film cuts from El Wray and Cherry starting to have sex, says "MISSING REEL", and when it cuts back, everything is on fire and we'll never know why. We'll also never know just who El Wray really is and why the police chief suddenly has the utmost respect for him.
- In The Kiss, Charles has just caught Pierre kissing Charles's wife Irene. Charles seems to be about to beat Pierre to death, Irene is trying to pull Charles off of Pierre, the door swings shut, and a shot rings out. We don't find out how Charles got shot until the end.
Literature
- In Cold Blood starts with the murderers arriving at the farmhouse, then jumps to the aftermath. The central mystery of the book isn't "Who killed the victims?" but "Why were they killed?"
- Parodied in "The Macbeth Murder Mystery" by James Thurber. An experienced consumer of detective novels, on reading Macbeth for the first time, notes that if a character is set up with a motive for murder and then shown going to commit the murder, but the action cuts away without actually showing the murder, it always turns out it was someone else who did it.
Live Action TV
- Without a Trace does this to set up every episode. The episode always begins with the last time that a witness saw the missing person. The detectives generally spend the rest of the episode trying to understand the victim and fill in the timeline after that.
- Leverage uses this trick to hide some of the crew's cleverer preparations: the audience usually isn't let in on the entire scheme until it actually goes down, when the missing steps are revealed in flashbacks. Veteran viewers will have little trouble identifying the moments when someone in the crew is doing SOMETHING that is part of the unrevealed plan (ex: Sophie borrowing someone's coat, Hardison working on some random little device, etc) but it's not always possible to tell how the pieces all fit together until the end.
- Home and Away has used this, with the audience never being quite sure about certain things such as Hugo's role in the 2009 mystery, or what the hell actually happened at the Sands on the night Penn died (assuming British viewers have caught up, here's one for those just starting to watch the week of this writing: Will killed him in self-defence after he threatened Shandi/Daria). They usually accomplish this by showing another storyline that ties into the characters involved in the scene.
- Arrested Development likes to do this on occasion, especially in season 4. More often seen is a similar trick where a scene appears to be complete, only for a later episode to reveal that something significant happened right after the apparent end of the scene, or even reveal that the scene itself was manipulatively edited to hide something in the middle of it.
- Justified in Quicksand, which is about the police trying to find out the cause of a school shooting. The series begins with the shooting happening offscreen, and the episode ends with a flashback that slams the door on the camera before it happens. Both times the viewer get to hear screams and gunshots, but what actually occurred in left vague. It is justified due to the main character having Trauma-Induced Amnesia, and the viewer is only shown what she can remember.
- The first episode of Chernobyl shows the immediate aftermath of the explosion: bewildered technicians, horrific injuries, fire, wreckage, an exposed reactor core spewing radiation everywhere. "How does an RMBK reactor explode?" becomes the Driving Question of the series, and the sequence of events leading up to the explosion (and why that sequence lead to the explosion) is not revealed until the final episode.
Music
- Possibly unintentional, but Hinder's "Lips of an Angel" starts off with the the singer getting a call from his old flame. He asks why she's calling so late and why she's crying, but we never find out the answers, as the rest of the song is immediately hijacked by him singing about how he still has feelings for her.
Video Games
- The World Ends with You has several instances where it jumps to the next day and only later flashes back to what happened in the previous day. Particularly confusing due to the fact that the nature of the Game means that days normally end in the same abrupt manner.
- The PC version of Clue: Master Detective started with a still cutscene of Mr. Boddy alive in his chair. There is a blackout signifying an unknown amount of time passing and then we see Mr. Boddy dead in his chair. Makes one wonder as to how the "where the murder occurred" part of the mystery fits in....
- A few Ace Attorney cases start this way, featuring stills of two characters talking and the insinuation that action occurs, but no identification of the speakers or display of the murder itself. Others involve a relatively coherent scene, but the criminal is shrouded in shadows and unidentifiable—and due to the text-based nature of the game, identification by voice is also impossible.
- The House of the Dead: OVERKILL, wearing its inspiration from Grindhouse on its sleeve, has a similar sequence near the end, where Isaac Washington and Agent G both solemnly prepare to do battle with the Final Boss... then one MISSING REEL later, the two of them are standing outside the burning laboratory, remarking how convenient it was they just happened to find those gatling guns. Then they fight the Final Boss for real. (The "Director's Cut" version later adds the supposed missing sequence back in.)
Webcomics
- Fleep plays with the reader by cutting from the initial shot of the protagonist entering a phone booth and him waking up in another phone booth surrounded by concrete. As it turns out, that interval is a lot longer than you might expect...
- Homestuck likes to show scenes in whatever order seems most dramatically convenient. It often leads to the narrator lampshading how we're DEFINITELY going to see what's coming next.
Western Animation
- Avatar: The Last Airbender does this when the Kyoshi Warriors encounter Azula and her friends. We don't find out what happens to them until over halfway through the next season.
- Lampshaded in The Simpsons episode "Wild Barts Can't Be Broken". Homer is asked about what he did the previous night. We see his memory of the event as a sepia-toned silent movie, with the parts he forgot due to being drunk replaced with a title card labeled "SCENE MISSING".
