Murder mystery movies have enjoyed a renaissance in recent years, with wonderfully nuanced characters – usually with ostentatious wealth and personality disorders – driving crooked, dramatic plotlines.
Notably, there was 2017’s Murder on the Orient Express. The film follows a detective solving a murder on board a transcontinental luxury train, and has an all-star cast including Johnny Depp, Michelle Pfeiffer, Penelope Cruz, Daisy Ridley, Judi Dench and Willem Dafoe. Then there was 2019’s Knives Out, the mystery starring Daniel Craig, Jamie Lee Curtis and Ana de Armas, in which a detective investigates the death of a crime novelist. This year, Death on the Nile was released, with Gal Gadot caught up in catching a murderer on board a glamorous river steamer.
The latest cinema offering from BAFTA-winning director Tom George, See How They Run, takes the murder mystery genre one step further. The movie is set in London’s West End in the 1950s. Academy Award-winning actor Sam Rockwell (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri) and Golden Globe-winning actress Saoirse Ronan (Lady Bird) star as an odd and comical detective duo tasked with solving the absurd murder of a Hollywood director – one who was ironically in the middle of making a movie about a play that explores a homicide. Yes, it’s a whodunit inside a whodunit. Inception, indeed.
In an early scene in the film, cynical Scotland Yard detective Inspector Stoppard (Rockwell) and enthusiastic newbie Constable Stalker (Ronan) are called to a stage to investigate the death of arrogant American director Leo Köpernick (Adrien Brody).
“It seems he was killed in the costume store, and then he was deposited here,” a young and green Stalker tells Stoppard, as they both hover over Leo’s dead body.
“Staged, so to speak,” she adds, smug at the timing of her own deftly funny joke.
It’s off-beat, irreverent comedy that intersects what would be a very serious plot moment in a usual murder mystery, and can be credited to screen writer Mark Chappell.
Brody says: “Chappell used to do stand-up comedy and he’ll just have an amazing one-liner or remark. The dialogue is fantastic in the movie, and the script is beautifully written.”
While the need to solve the case drives the plot along, it’s the highly watchable interactions between Rockwell and Ronan (particularly those in the car – a venting space for any detective) that make this film what it is: brilliant.
George says: “Neither [Stoppard or Stalker] anticipate that they might work well together at the start, but it feels like it could be an exciting thing by the end and it’s very funny along the way. The script came off the page as super smart and witty and had all the kind of comic elements that I love.”
Rockwell, who will turn 54 in November, says: “[I play] a drunk, sexist inspector from Scotland Yard who has post-traumatic stress from the war and his wife has left him. He’s sort of a tragic, dark character in a comic arena. I was never old enough to do these kinds of characters until now. I think I’ve been preparing all my life to play a character like this. I’ve always been an old soul.”
Most of the film was shot during the pandemic. As the cast and crew attest, one of lockdown’s silver linings was that they had access to the actual London theatres of the 1950s that otherwise would not have been available. It presented an opportunity to set a playful tone as an antidote to the darker times the world was experiencing – and a way of celebrating the life of the theatre.
George says: “For a couple of weeks, we were able to hire those wonderful venues as film locations. For example, the Old Vic is the main auditorium [in the film]. But the theatre itself is something of a composite of different theatres around London, with elements filmed at the Dominion Theatre. We filmed exteriors at the St Martin’s Theatre.”
Ronan says: “It was kind of bittersweet to film [in these spaces] because those stages are usually so full of life. The film is a celebration of London, too, and how rich a city it is and has always been, and how there’s so much grit but also grand beauty.”
See How They Run is in cinemas from 29 September.
