99 min | PG-13 | September 16, 2022 | Searchlight Pictures
A Hollywood director turns up dead backstage at the long-running West End production of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap. A hungover inspector and an over-eager constable work the case while the suspects rehearse their alibis. The film knows every whodunit trick and would rather wink at them than use them.
London, 1953. The Mousetrap is the toast of the West End, and a studio wants to turn the hit play into a film. Then someone murders the American director hired to make it. Inspector Stoppard and Constable Stalker catch the case, and the suspects are the cast and crew of a stage murder mystery. See How They Run is a whodunit about whodunits. It spends as much energy mocking the conventions of the form as it does deploying them.
Sam Rockwell plays Inspector Stoppard as a hungover wreck who solves little and admits it. He slumps through interrogations and treats the case as an interruption of his drinking. Saoirse Ronan plays Constable Stalker as his opposite, a green officer who fills her notebook with theories and names a culprit before the first interview ends. The two-hander between them carries the film. Adrien Brody plays the murdered director Leo Köpernick and narrates from beyond the grave with sour contempt for the genre. David Oyelowo plays screenwriter Mervyn Cocker-Norris with the wounded vanity of a man who thinks he is too good for the material.
Tom George directs his first feature with a symmetrical eye and a candy-colored period palette. Mark Chappell’s script stages its climax inside the very country house the characters keep describing, folding the movie into the play it pastiches. The production design recreates the 1950s theatre district in saturated greens and reds that flatten the world into a stage set. George leans on split-screen and freeze-frame to label suspects and underline jokes. The technique is confident and the wit is real. It also keeps reminding you that you are watching a construction rather than a mystery.
The problem is that a story this knowing about its own tricks forgets to make you care who did it. Every clue arrives with quotation marks around it. The murder exists to service the commentary, and the commentary says that whodunits are silly and predictable. Rockwell and Ronan are charming enough to paper over the hollowness for most of the film. See How They Run is a smart movie about a dumb genre that never decides to be a great example of it. It would rather explain the joke than tell one.