See How They Run: a campy cat-and-mouse caper

There’s no doubt about it: the whodunit is enjoying a euphoric comeback. Rian Johnson’s Knives Out (2019, with its sequel Glass Onion just released) announced as much, Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022) confirmed the trend, and now TV director Tom George (This Country, 2017-20) makes his big-screen debut with a mischievous dive into the genre that not only plays fast and loose with its conventions, but even introduces Agatha Christie herself (Shirley Henderson, billed only as ‘Dame’) as a member of the cast.

We’re in London’s West End in 1953, and the cast and crew of Christie’s drama The Mousetrap, which is destined – though they don’t yet know it – to become the world’s longest-running stage-play, are celebrating its hundredth performance. Joining the party, which includes the stars Richard Attenborough (Harris Dickinson) and his wife Sheila Sim (Pearl Chanda), are film producer John Woolf (Reece Shearsmith), who’s hoping to make a movie adapted from the play, and American director Leo Köpernick (Adrien Brody), whom Woolf has invited to direct it.

The biggest disruption to Woolf’s plans occurs when, within the first few minutes of the movie, Köpernick is murdered. Since he was an abrasive and quarrelsome character there’s no shortage of potential suspects – not least Attenborough, who’d just accused him of making a pass at Sim. Enter the police: cynical, near-alcoholic Inspector Stoppard (Sam Rockwell) and naïve, over-enthusiastic young Constable Stalker (Saoirse Ronan). Their ill-matched partnership makes for consistent comedy, with Ronan giving the film’s standout performance against strong competition.

Mark Chappell’s script has fun sending up all the conventions of the genre, kicking off with a voice-over emanating, as it turns out, from the character about to be bumped off. (“It’s a whodunnit – you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all,” he sneers just prior to his murder.) At one point Mervyn Cocker-Norris (David Oyelowo), the pretentiously camp playwright brought in to write the projected screenplay, comments on the banality of using flashbacks in murder mysteries – upon which, of course, we slip straight into a flashback. “Could they all have done it?” speculates Stalker – an unmissable nod to Murder on the Orient Express.

There are hints of Wes Anderson in these self-aware games – thought not so much so as to make the movie feel derivative. The recreation of 1950s London, its cars like giant clockwork toys, is affectionately done, and here and there the plot even draws on truth – John Woolf was a leading British producer of the time, and The Mousetrap really was inspired by real-life events. Even Sight & Sound gets a namecheck. What more could anyone want?

► See How They Run is in UK cinemas now.