See How They Run

1953, London. The whole city is in crime fever, and they all want to see the play “The Mousetrap” by Agatha Christie. The long-running hit has now had 100 performances, and a film is now to be produced to benefit from the enormous popularity of the play. A director has already been found, the American Leo Köpernick ( Adrien Brody ) to bring the material to the big screen. But then he dies during the big celebration, putting the film on hold for the time being. Inspector Stoppard ( Sam Rockwell ) and the overzealous Constable Stalker ( Saoirse Ronan) are given the task of finding the murderer. It’s not easy, because actually nobody could stand the deceased. He quarreled several times with Mervyn Cocker-Norris ( David Oyelowo ), who is supposed to write the film’s screenplay. Richard Attenborough ( Harris Dickinson ), the main actor in See How They Run

even got into a real fight during the party…

Few names are more associated with crime books than Agatha Christie. She wrote dozens of novels and short stories, created two of the most famous sniffing noses of all with Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, And then there were none more in the most successful crime novel of all time with more than 100 million copies sold. Like many of her other stories, this one was filmed, many times. And yet, perhaps the greatest phenomenon of the author’s long career has been The Mousetrap. Although initial reviews weren’t great, people flocked to the performances. Performed continuously from 1952 to 2020, no other play has ever come close to such numbers. If it weren’t for the corona pandemic, which meant the forced closure of all theaters, the run would still not have come to an end.

However, unlike other well-known works by Christie, this one was never made into a film, at least not in the West. But that’s what See How They Run is for now. The film is not a direct adaptation. Only brief moments of a stage performance can be seen in it. Instead, there is a “real” murder to solve that is related to The Mousetrap but not taken from the play itself. It was screenwriter Mark Chappellbut don’t shy away from using the story as a commentary on the crime genre itself. The film begins with Köpernick expressing his contempt for the classic whodunit crime novels, which are supposed to run according to the same principle over and over again. If you know one, you know them all. When the director’s killer is sought, then it is always associated with meta elements.

• See How They Run