Mark Reviews Movies: SEE HOW THEY RUN

See How They Run, Searchlight Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 15, 2022

Mark Chappell's screenplay for See How They Run tries to be a legitimate murder mystery, a winking dissection of that genre, and a screwball comedy revolving around eccentric characters who can barely be bothered to care about who has been and could be killed. For as much as the movie attempts to do, though, it seems to forget to establish some of the foundational elements of its mystery and its satire.

The unfocused affair does start with some promise, at least. A narrator establishes the scene—the West End area of London circa 1952—and the basic background of the plot that's about to unfold. Agatha Christie's play The Mousetrap has just completed its 100th performance, and its rousing financial success has garnered the attention of Hollywood. The narrator, by the way, is one of those Hollywood players: Leo Köpernick (Adrien Brody), a movie director who has been hired to helm a screen adaptation of Christie's play.

In Leo's mind, the joke's on the famous writer, the people involved in the stage production, and the play itself, because the director has little interest in murder mysteries. They're predictable affairs, he tells us, with lengthy prologues establishing characters who will become suspects, the setting of some remote country manor, and the inevitable inciting incident in which the most unlikeable character in the first act is violently dispatched.

In Chappell and director Tom George's mind, of course, the joke is on Leo, for reasons that should become quite apparent when the play's star Richard "Dickie" Attenborough (Harris Dickinson) shoves the movie director into a cake for making untoward advances at the actor's co-star and wife Shelia Sim (Pearl Chanda). In the backstage area and confronting a shadowy killer, Leo realizes, too late, that he's the most unlikeable person here.

From the start, then, Chappell's screenplay is going for a difficult balance of simultaneously jabbing at and embracing the traditional conventions of the murder mystery. The rest of the plot plays out as a fairly routine one—albeit one that exists within the behind-the-scenes world of a fictional mystery and the drama of people putting on such entertainment.

The suspects, who could become future victims if the killer's motive goes beyond Leo, have plenty of secrets, such producer John Woolf (Reece Shearsmith) and his extramarital affair with his assistant, and, in the case of screenwriter Mervyn Cocker-Norris (David Oyelowo), are fully aware of the conventions of the kind story in which they suddenly find themselves. Mervyn's interrogation scene, for example, has the persnickety writer decrying the cliché of using flashbacks to reveal information, even as Chappell and George give us one to show the man's possible motive for the crime.

The main detective on the case is Inspector Stoppard (Sam Rockwell), whose name is at least an in-joke that doesn't matter to how things unfold—unlike how much Christie's play, its history, its plot, and its famous twist figure into the background, plotting, and conclusion of the movie's own mystery, while Chappell doesn't provide the context for the audience to make those connections. Stoppard isn't much of a detective, since he's too busy being miserable and trying to drink away his sorrows to do much investigating. He's apparently the only available detective at the moment, since London is also in a panic over a serial killer (Forget that, though, because Chappell does).

Meanwhile, his partner on the case, the upstart Constable Stalker (Saoirse Ronan), might pay too much attention to the details, jotting down everything in a notepad. That leads her to jump to conclusions after learning each new piece of evidence or possible motive for wanting Leo dead.

In theory, all of this fairly clever in its level of self-awareness, even if Chappell often leaves us feeling like one of the famous mystery writer's friends, who appears in the third act and admits to being lost amidst all the inside talk about the play at the story's center and its real-life origins. In practice, though, the movie ends up playing a series of conflicting goals, approaches, and tones together without much concern for those ideas individually or for how each one undermines the other.

It doesn't quite work as the madcap comedy suggested by these variously peculiar personalities and the occasional flashes of rat-a-tat dialogue, because George invests most of the energy here into the plotting. As a result, the story's pace lingers and ambles too much to maintain a jokey attitude. In terms of playing as a straightforward mystery, Chappell's screenplay does too much poking and prodding at the very nature of such tales for us to take its own seriously (The movie's climax, for example, piles on so many familiar elements that they distract from a couple of otherwise intriguing narrative—such as in whose country manor the final sequence takes place—and thematic—the killer's motive—ideas).

Mostly, See How They Run aims to pick apart the formula in which it occasionally indulges. The ideas for a few good jokes are here, but the setups—as a satire, a comedy, and a mystery—are too muddled for the punch lines to function.

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