See How They Run turns the world’s most famous whodunit into a big meta gag
The Mousetrap, Agatha Christie’s famous stage murder mystery, has never been filmed. When Christie signed the film rights over to producer John Woolf, she stipulated that the film could only be made six months after the play closed on the West End. It never has. Still going 70 years after it opened in 1952, The Mousetrap is the longest-running play in history. So the film never came to be.
That piece of trivia is a plot point in See How They Run, a game little meta-whodunit steeped in London theater 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 was considering filming the play, he says, but when he discovered Christie had thwarted him, he saw a way to not just circumvent this obstacle, but to turn it to his advantage: He resolved to create a fictional whodunit about the whodunit, and turn the film rights themselves into one of the cogs in its murderous machine.
See How They Run, written by Mark Chappell and directed by Tom George, turns Christie inside out and upside down, and has a good laugh at the undignified spectacle that process creates. It satirizes the creaking mechanisms of the genre even as it leans 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.
The setup is wonderfully wicked, though. On the occasion of 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),
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