See How They Run
A backstage murder turns a perky homage to The Mousetrap into a whodunit of its own.
A stage fright: Sam Rockwell and Saoirse Ronan
For contractual reasons, a film about The Mousetrap is impossible. At least until Agatha Christie’s whodunit finishes its initial run in the West End. See How They Run, itself a whodunit, is set in 1953 and is as close to a film of The Mousetrap as the cinema can pull off. A deliciously meta, chucklesome confection, it plays with theatrical fact just as Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds toyed with German history and his Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood teased American legend. So, was dear Richard Attenborough really a murder suspect of a homicide committed backstage at the Ambassadors Theatre?
The film’s narrator, a sardonic, hard-drinking Hollywood “big shot” (his words) is not a fan of Agatha Christie’s cherished thriller. In fact, he’s downright rude about it. And in the tradition of the very whodunit that he disdains, the cast’s most unlikeable character is the first to be bumped off. Of course, he had it coming, dismissing Attenborough (Harris Dickinson) and his fashionable wife Sheila Sim (Pearl Chanda) as “what passes for glamour in these parts.” These parts is the London stage and it is replete with characters willing to whack the American intruder in their midst. And so somebody of average height and medium build (wearing a coat and hat) ends the life of the movie maker (Adrien Brody) with a ski and a sewing machine.
While the stereotypes of the West End stage are played to a tee by a colourful cast, the main action focuses on the slovenly, world-weary Inspector Stoppard (Sam Rockwell) and his inexperienced assistant, Constable Stalker (Saoirse Ronan, nailing her bon mots with comic precision). Stoppard is something of a sad sack, a divorcee driven to drink by a war wound and an unfaithful ex-wife who, in spite of his prescient surname, knows nothing of the theatre and hasn’t heard of Richard Attenborough. Sam Rockwell (who won an Oscar for playing another unconventional, alcoholic lawman in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri), invests his character with a grubby humanity – and a passable English accent. Meanwhile, Saoirse Ronan as his star-struck collaborator is a delight, always jumping to the wrong conclusion in her eagerness to solve a highly complex case.
No doubt those with a passing knowledge of the milieu – the theatre and the whodunit – will derive more pleasure from the film, although it is very funny on its own terms. A subplot involving the investigation of the murders at 10 Rillington Place adds a period fillip, a case that was dramatised by another film (which happened to star the real Richard Attenborough). And talking of plays, it should be pointed out that this is not a film version of Philip King’s long-running play of the same name. Meanwhile, The Mousetrap creaks on into its seventieth year in the West End.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Sam Rockwell, Saoirse Ronan, Adrien Brody, Ruth Wilson, Reece Shearsmith, Harris Dickinson, Charlie Cooper, David Oyelowo, Shirley Henderson, Lucian Msamati, Pippa Bennett-Warner, Pearl Chanda, Paul Chahidi, Sian Clifford, Jacob Fortune-Lloyd, Tim Key, Laura Morgan, Maggie McCarthy, Philip Desmeules, Angus Wright.
Dir Tom George, Pro Damian Jones and Gina Carter, Screenplay Mark Chappell, Ph Jamie D. Ramsay, Pro Des Amanda McArthur, Ed Gary Dollner and Peter Lambert, Music Daniel Pemberton, Costumes Odile Dicks-Mireaux, Sound Paul Carter, Dialect coach Jane Karen.
DJ Films-Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures UK.
98 mins. USA/UK. 2022. UK Rel: 9 September 2022. US Rel: 16 September 2022. Cert. 12A.
