See How They Run (2022)
Sam Rockwell doing British… Agatha Christie. The Mouse Trap. Cake! Richard Attenborough!
The Mouse Trap celebrates its 100th performance — Agatha Christie can’t make it but sends a celebratory cake! Smarmy Leo Köpernick (Adrian Brodie) annoys everyone — as a film director he wants to revitalize the Mouse Trap as a film noire gangster shoot up! He’s also bickering with the very civilised Mervyn Cocker-Norris (David Oyelowo), the script writer tasked with transforming the Mouse Trap into a movie. It’s the 1950s so everything is OTT and yet stilted, with huge Grand Budapest Hotel vibes.
However, Köpernick irritates so much that he is horribly murdered in the theatre, as well as destroying the cake and the crustacean buffet during a fight with Richard Attenborough. To solve the crime, Inspector Stoppard (a reflective Sam Rockwell) and keen bee Constable Stalker (Saoirse Ronan), who notes every detail down in her notebook for later. But the show must go on, so pressure is on to find out who done it sooner rather than later!
Ruth Wilson also features as Petula Spencer, doyenne of the West End with her ever hungry aged mother in tow! With some further murders, red herrings, false exits (literal) and a denouncement at a country house in the winter snow (Chez Christies no less), See How They Run keeps you on tenterhooks until the end to work out who the culprit is.
There is much to like and loads to engage with in this movie (often with fun split screens so you see both perspectives — very Hitchcockian). My only concern is Constable Stalker’s hair — which started off very 1950s flick, lost this halfway through and suddenly bounces back again towards historical accuracy at the end! Sam Rockwell models a jaded moustache and beer belly wonderfully — as well as not being able to tell dentists and pubs apart! Apart from having a less theatrical name (there is even an Inspector Hound joke!) Constable Stalker is the heart of the movie — a woman in a man’s world, valiantly doing her job and being completely star struck at the same time! Also heavily featuring shovels! and truth strangely mirroring fiction!
