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See How They Run, review: a delightfully absurd Mousetrap send-up that has its cheese and eats it

Ruth WIlson, Reece Shearsmith, Harris Dickinson, Sian Clifford, Pearl Chanda, Jacob Fortune Lloyd, David Oyelowo and Ania Marson in See How They Run - Parisa Taghizadeh
Ruth WIlson, Reece Shearsmith, Harris Dickinson, Sian Clifford, Pearl Chanda, Jacob Fortune Lloyd, David Oyelowo and Ania Marson in See How They Run - Parisa Taghizadeh

Getting The Mousetrap into cinemas is a game that’s defeated every producer who’s tried. Blame Agatha Christie’s distaste for adaptations, which yielded a clause she insisted on when she sold the rights: no film of the play was ever allowed to shoot until six months after it closed.

Famously, of course, that never happened. Even devious old Christie could hardly have dreamed that 28,000 West End performances would keep the identity of the killer safely off our screens to this day. The people behind See How They Run, with its mousetrap-adjacent title, have craftily figured out how to make the next best thing: a jolly, winking, and delightfully absurd send-up.

We open outside the Ambassadors Theatre in 1953, with the mystery wrapping its 100th performance. Right before the curtain, a telegram drops from Agatha explaining she won’t make the party after all, but has sent a big cake. Within 10 minutes, someone’s dead in the dressing room.

Let alone whodunit, I’m not even divulging who gets done in, because that’s an impish sting in itself. The plot specifically revolves around Christie’s contract stipulations, as well as the true story she based her play on. It also remembers the first actor to play Sgt Trotter – none other than Dickie Attenborough, who’s rendered here in a peach of an impersonation by Harris Dickinson, both wicked and affectionate.

The usual suspects haughtily assemble: glam impresario Petula Spencer (Ruth Wilson), dandyish playwright Mervyn (David Oyelowo) and the actual producer who fatefully signed on that dotted line, John Woolf (a furtive Reece Shearsmith). Adrien Brody, raising toasts in his Wes Anderson glad-rags, is one Leo Köpernick, the American movie director Woolf wants to hire, who thinks the play’s a relic and sets about raising hell.

Sam Rockwell and Saoirse Ronan in See How They Run - Parisa Taghizadeh
Sam Rockwell and Saoirse Ronan in See How They Run - Parisa Taghizadeh

Right from the start, the film bounces in with a junior-Stoppardian sense of jest. No wonder that surname is shared by Sam Rockwell’s jaded Scotland Yard gumshoe, paired to solve all this with a go-getting constable (Saoirse Ronan). If Rockwell’s British accent throws you out, that’s hard luck, but I think it’s better than passable, and it’s lovely to hear Ronan’s natural speaking voice again. The two are charming together.

Mark Chappell’s script has a refreshingly high laugh-rate as these things go, with a seam of pure English silliness that sets it well apart from Knives Out, without gunning for anything like that league of plot ingenuity. It’s closer, really, to doing for Christie what Scream did for the slasher flick – goosing the formula with winks and tickles. A typical ruse has Oyelowo’s gay scribe airily disdaining flashbacks while actually being in one: the kind of meta japery that can easily irritate, but has enough daft cheek here to work.

If we’re quibbling, director Tom George, importing two co-stars from his glorious sitcom This Country, gets a little carried away with split-screen, but it’s a harder task than anyone realises to keep this kind of trifle aerated. Besides us, everyone on screen is palpably having fun: Fleabag’s Sian Clifford as Woolf’s fuming wife, Tim Key as a smug police commissioner, Dickinson as the definition of a pampered luvvie. Then up pops Shirley Henderson for a couple of scatty scenes, as none other than “the popular author” in her country pile. It’s a whizzy fairground ride in theatreland, powered entirely by the thought of a literary icon spinning in her grave.


12A cert, 98 min. In cinemas from Friday September 9