‘See How They Run’ Review: A Whodunnit Romp in the Key of Wes Anderson

The mystery-comedy See How They Run undersells its best features and overplays the more mediocre. Set in London in 1953, the film busily corkscrews a whodunnit and a narrative about mismatched cops into the behind-the-scenes machinations around a planned movie adaptation of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap, then only a few months into its 70-or-so-year run. After the adaptation’s potential director, the blacklisted and highly opinionated drunk Leo Kopernick (Adrien Brody), is found murdered and deposited on the theater stage, the police—pert and eager Constable Stalker (Saoirse Ronan), depressed and cynical Inspector Stoppard (Sam Rockwell)—set about determining which of the cast or crew did the deed.

Mark Chappell’s screenplay aims for a cool and knowing tone from the start. Nodding in a somewhat self-satisfied manner to its own cleverness as much as to the introduction to Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, Kopernick’s spirit narrates the events leading up to his death. He delivers a good line of patter in that classic mid-century, vaguely Brooklyn accent that’s meant to denote a smartass operator, as we watch him louche around a cast party that conveniently introduces most of the main characters. Piling the self-referentiality deep, Kopernick also lays out the plot of the hoary The Mousetrap, which will be called back to in this film’s climax, before sniffily describing it as “a whodunnit: You’ve seen one, you’ve seen ‘em all.”

Right away, though, the story deviates from the classic Christie whodunnit, in that after the body is discovered, the suspects are all allowed to leave, rather than kept in a locked room where tensions quickly boil over. Instead, See How They Run follows Stalker and Stoppard as they question the suspects in a fairly relaxed manner. Compared to the film’s perky start, and the catty back-and-forth that results whenever The Mousetrap’s cast comes together, these stretches are a bit desultory. Ronan is a firecracker as the overeager newbie, but Rockwell doesn’t quite invest Stoppard’s half-drunk moroseness with much conviction.

Things perk back up whenever the action swings away from the investigation back to the secrecy and back-stabbing among the play’s cast and crew. As the screamingly pretentious screenwriter Mervyn Cocker-Norris, David Oyelowo shows a heretofore unknown knack for audacious yet precise overacting. Ruth Wilson’s cold-blooded producer and Harris Dickinson’s turn as Richard Attenborough—who in real life was in the original cast of The Mousetrap, and so ends up being the one character here that we can feel safe thinking is innocent—both hit the right pitch of assured ludicrousness for this brand of self-conscious backstage farce.

After all, this is a film in which characters say things like “the play’s the thing” with an eye roll and a “three weeks later” title card is inserted right after Oyelowo’s shrill creative declares his hatred for such conventions. Less expected, given director Tom George’s background (he was responsible for a variety of BBC Proms specials) and the story’s staginess, is that the film looks an awful lot like something Wes Anderson’s second unit director might have cooked up.

That isn’t necessarily a complaint. Jaime Ramsay’s cinematography is jewel-box pretty and the sparkling production design is enjoyably luxe, working overtime to make postwar London look glamorous. Some of the framing and attempted whimsy might be faux-Anderson, but as in the real thing the narrative pacing and the performers’ committed enthusiasm helps rush the viewer right past any such distractions. A pleasant trifle, See How They Run breaks little new ground but is at least a notable improvement on, well, The Mousetrap.