See How They Run Review: Meta Noir

Leo Köpernick opens the film with that snarky monologue because he’s hiding out from Joseph McCarthy and the black list in the U.K., where he’s been hired to make a movie adaptation of Agatha Christie’s “The Mousetrap,” a wildly successful whodunit for the stage that has been running for 100 shows. His rapacious nature has already rubbed wrong his producer John Woolf (Reece Shearsmith), his screenwriter Mervyn Cocker-Norris (David Oyelowo), and his star Richard Attenborough (Harris Dickinson). So it shouldn’t be a shock when he turns up dead on stage — his loose tongue ripped from inside his mouth — because, after all, the victim is always whoever has the most potentially murderous enemies. 

Enter Inspector Stoppard (Sam Rockwell), a disheveled detective tasked with catching the killer without interrupting the lucrative run of the play and enraging his superiors’ friends. Stoppard is paired off with the inexperienced but dedicated Constable Stalker (Saoirse Ronan), a starstruck rookie who loves movies and can’t stop seeing the investigation through the rules and tropes of the whodunit. Stoppard, by comparison, is laconic to the point of looking like an errant sleepwalker, a perpetually soused man grumbling through life with broad questions and no implied deeper analysis. He’s nothing like the gumshoes Stalker has such an affinity for on the stage and the big screen.

Above all else, Stoppard impresses upon Stalker the importance of not jumping to conclusions, of not assuming the easiest interpretations of available data simply because it feels narratively cogent given her jaundiced understanding of crime solving. But that becomes harder for her to do the deeper they get into interrogating suspects and the more she finds out about Stoppard’s own past and how it may connect with the victim’s.

There are plenty of plausible suspects from within the production, as each testimony proves that Leo had some kind of beef with almost everyone he came into contact with. But Stoppard is largely dismissive of each potential resolution to the case, struggling as he is to stay upright most of the time. The glamor and the charm and the procedural element of the whodunit become frustratingly stunted as the viewer must contend with a real-life murder living in the shadow of a fun, fake one. 

The tension between expectations and reality makes Stoppard a strangely compelling figure. A movie this obsessed with the way whodunits function means that every time Stoppard seems checked out, or too grizzled to truly care, we the viewer feel like we’re just a scene or two away from him Poirot-ing out of his somnambulant spell to spring into action and set everything straight. But what if he can’t?