The director who Adrien Brody plays in this crime thriller is not a fan of the genre: Agatha Christie's "The Mousetrap" is a second-rate whodunit play, i.e. a crime thriller whose entire tension is fed by the question of who the killer is.

"Once you've seen one, you know them all," he adds, before admitting that he came to London as a Hollywood director in 1953 to film this very play.

Maria Wiesner

Editor in the “Society & Style” department.

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So, on the evening of the hundredth performance, he finds himself in the poorly lit props, gets drunk on bad whiskey and then fights Richard Attenborough, the main actor of the play and his film project, with the help of various buffet utensils.

Drinks slap in the face, crustaceans fly, the director lands in a cake and then looks for a spare shirt in the dim light when he is suddenly killed by a stranger.

"I should have seen it coming: the least likeable character is always the first to be killed."

With such a meta-joke, “See How They Run” begins and continues in that tone.

Since Kenneth Branagh successfully remade Agatha Christie's "Murder on the Orient Express" with a star cast in 2017 and Rian Johnson showed two years later with "Knives Out" how surprising camerawork can use the crime genre for intelligent character development, the murder hunt has returned to the big screen .

"See How They Run" not only entertains the audience with the ironic gimmicks of postmodernism (one theater critic complains that flashbacks are lazy narrative strategies that also interrupt the narrative flow, only to be interrupted by such a flashback immediately after this statement), here an ensemble also shines in which everyone tries to outdo one another in terms of ability: Sam Rockwell mumbles through his interrogations as Inspector Stoppard with a three-day beard and tousled hair.

Saoirse Ronan proves her talent for slapstick as an overzealous constable stalker.

David Oyelowo embodies the affected British snob in a luminous silk coat.

Harris Dickinson plays the aforementioned actor Attenborough, who actually was part of the original cast of "Mousetrap" in 1953.

And Shirley Henderson can surprisingly boast as Agatha Christie ex Machina with pragmatic problem solving.

This is how fiction mixes with reality.

The British director Tom George draws a second plot line from the fight for the filming rights in the 1950s, which deals centrally with a fundamental question of the genre: Do you want to see a crime thriller when you already know how it ends?

So here is the British producer John Woolf, who wants to acquire the film rights in one go and gets the condition in the small print of the contract that the film adaptation may only begin when the play is no longer performed.

In fact, The Mousetrap was the longest running play in the world.

Until the theaters in London had to close due to the 2020 pandemic lockdown, the crime story had been staged there for more than six decades.

Woolf got stuck with the lucrative play.

In the film, this clause in the contract becomes one of the motives for murder, because the theater remains closed where investigations are carried out.

In order to eliminate the concern about "spoilers" that is so widespread today, "See How They Run" is told as frayed and circuitous as possible, including cross-references, but in the end what is left is what should be left: The film is entertaining, and Ronan and Rockwell enrich the genre with a loveable couple of investigators.