See How They Run review: Agatha Christie’s most famous mystery, but meta

The Mousetrap, Agatha Christie’s famous stage murder mystery, has never been filmed. Christie stipulated to John Woolf that film rights could not be released until six months after closing of the West End play. This has never happened. It’s still going strong 70 years after its opening in 1952. The MousetrapThis is the longest running play in history. The film was never made.

This trivial detail is an important plot point. You can see how they runThe game is a meta-whodunit that’s steeped in London theatre lore. It’s also the origin story of the movie itself, if you believe the tale producer Damian Jones spins in the production notes. Jones had been considering filming this play but after discovering that Christie was blocking him, he realized a way around it. He decided to make a fictional detective. More The whodunit and make the film rights into cogs of its deadly machine.

You can see how they runThe film, written and directed by Tom George by Mark Chappell. While it satirizes creaking mechanisms, the movie also leans heavily on them. It’s an in-joke of a movie, and a pretty good one, enlivened by a terrific cast. But George and Chappell are a little too in love with their own postmodern cleverness, and not concerned enough with constructing as knotty and satisfying a mystery as, say, Rian Johnson’s whetstone-sharpened Knives out.

Photo: Parisa Taghizadeh/Searchlight Pictures

Although the setup looks fantastic, it is quite bizarre. The occasion was The Mousetrap’s 100th performance — in the real world, it has now run more than 27,500 times — the cast, led by Richard “Dickie” Attenborough (Harris Dickinson), assembles for a party. Woolf (Reece Shearsmith), a filmmaker, is also present. Leo Kopernick(Adrien Brody), an infidel, and blacklisted Hollywood director Woolf had hired, are there to help make the film. Screenplay adaptations are being handled by Mervyn Kocker-Norris (David Oyelowo), a highly cilious playwright. Petula Spencer (Ruth Wilson), theater impresario, sits at the sidelines. Everyone’s a bit testy, for various reasons, and Kopernick and Attenborough get into a fistfight. Kopernick is found dead on the stage at the end. Will the show continue?

Given the production’s history, there’s a mischievous playfulness to this premise — and that’s before the police turn up. To solve this case, Inspector Stoppard (Sam Rockwell), a world-weary and inept alcoholic has been assigned to work with Constable Stalker (Saoirse Roan). They don’t get any help, because the rest of the murder squad is focusing on the real-world, much darker, Rillington Place murders. This theaterland murder is a lot of fun compared to them.

The wit and double-sided delicacy of this detail — underlining the innocuous silliness of the proceedings, while rooting them in a real time and place — is typical of what You can see how they run offers, and it’s one of the movie’s principal pleasures. It’s more fun guessing which figures are caricatures of real people and which are cartoonish inventions than it is trying to figure out who the murderer is.

Photo: Parisa Taghizadeh/Searchlight Pictures

For an outrageous, bold payoff, there are two late-film cameos that play into this distorted reality. Similar production design is used to create a 1950s London that’s glitzy and glamorous, but with an authentic feel. (The producers’ opportunism strikes again: The film was shot during the COVID-19 pandemic, which gave the production access to some of London’s grandest theaters and hotels to shoot in, as they were shuttered for lockdown.)

You can see how they run works better as an outright comedy than as a murder mystery, although it doesn’t nail either form. Chappell’s script is loaded with tasty barbs, painful puns, and gently mocking characterization. George is a veteran British television comedy director who knows how to create gags and make them work. But there’s a halting rhythm to it, and scenes sometimes coast too long in an airless haze in between jokes. It was difficult to film comedy under these conditions because of its dependency on the cast’s chemistry.

End credits go to the cast. Ronan is the charmingly sincere Stalker. Her comic lines are executed with perfect timing. Stalker’s credulous naiveté starts out as a joke — she notes down anything anyone says, and believes the case closed after every interview — but in Ronan’s hands becomes an endearing kind of heroism.

Poho: Parisa Taghizadeh/Searchlight Pictures

Contrasting her brightness with Rockwell’s jaded, mumbling Stoppard is right out of the buddy-cop playbook, but Rockwell’s amusingly underplayed turn complements Ronan’s perfectly. Stoppard is a straight-laced, stoic man who just allows the fun to unfold around him.

Dickinson’s take on Attenborough is a riot, skewering a certain kind of genteel, leading-man fatuousness. The secondary cast is a murderer’s row of British TV and theater pros: people like Sian Clifford (Fleabag), Lucian Msamati (Game of ThronesShirley Henderson (Harry Potter) and Tim Key (The different Alan Partridge projects). They can both pull off love-yet-savage characterisations in a matter of lines. It looks effortless.

You can see how they runIt is a joke, an innocuous slap on cinematic and theatrical artifice. It uses self-mockery, as well as other larks, to get out of the contract. There’s a voice-over from Adrien Brody as Kopernick, the deceased director, who disdainfully picks apart the cliches and rudimentary constructions of the whodunit genre from beyond the grave, moments before they appear on screen. The basic Hollywood instincts of his character are mocked and then used the next. Having a character point out your film’s flaws doesn’t really excuse them. But it doesn’t invalidate the film’s pleasures, either. You can see how they run The creators don’t believe that it is as intelligent or stupid as they think. It doesn’t have much to say about whodunits other than “Wouldn’t it be funny if they existed inside their own world?” And yes, it turns out, it would.

You can see how they runSeptember 16th, in theatres