See How They Run (2022)

3 Stars (out of 4)

Mice Tag

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

With See How They Run, writer Mark Chappell and director Tom George (making his feature debut) set out to tell a self-aware murder mystery, designed to look and feel like an old-fashioned, Agatha Christie-style murder mystery, and somehow manage to have it both ways. Agatha Christie herself (Shirley Henderson) is even here. It's the 1950s in London, and Christie's play The Mousetrap has celebrated its 100th performance (there will be many, many more). Disgraced American film director Leo Kopernick (Adrien Brody) has been tapped to direct the film version, but he's clashing with the eloquent screenwriter, Mervyn Cocker-Norris (David Oyelowo). (Not a fan of whodunits, Kopernick insists that there must be a murder in the first ten minutes.) In any case, after a public brawl at a party, Kopernick winds up murdered. World-weary Inspector Stoppard (Sam Rockwell) is called in to investigate, but he's saddled with a rookie, Constable Stalker (Saoirse Ronan), who talks a lot and jots everything down in her notebook. Ronan steals the picture, easily, with her snappy comic performance, forever excited at getting a shot at her first murder. George gives the movie a squeaky-clean, polished look, echoing 1950s movies more than 1950s life, and the theater setting and array of character faces feels just right. (Harris Dickinson plays a young Richard Attenborough, star of the play.) It's pretty frivolous, and not as meaty as Kenneth Branagh's recent Christie adaptations (Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile), but it's breezy fun.