Agatha Christie’s ‘The Mousetrap’ Got a Self-Reflexive Makeover in ‘See How They Run’
There has never been a film adaptation of Agatha Christie’s extremely long-running stage play The Mousetrap, but the prospect of such an adaptation is central to the cheeky 2022 comedic murder mystery See How They Run. Although it’s not based on an actual Christie story, the author and her work are central to the film from director Tom George and screenwriter Mark Chappell, which follows the investigation into a backstage murder at the West End production of The Mousetrap in 1953.
The murder is fictional, but The Mousetrap really was running in the West End in 1953, and many of the characters in See How They Run are real people. The interplay between reality and fiction is foregrounded in the self-aware See How They Run, which is as much about the absurdity of whodunits as it is about the crime itself. The movie opens with hard-boiled narration that sounds like it might come from a stereotypical detective protagonist, but is instead the voice of cynical film director Leo Kopernick (Adrien Brody), expressing his contempt for the entire genre.
Kopernick says that The Mousetrap is “in my opinion, a second-rate murder mystery,” but he’s been hired by producer John Woolf (Reece Shearsmith) to direct the pending film adaptation. The irony for viewers who are knowledgeable about The Mousetrap is that Woolf’s contract with theater promoter Petula Spencer (Ruth Wilson) stipulates that his film can’t begin production until The Mousetrap has been closed on the West End for six months — and as of 2024, The Mousetrap is still being staged, holding a record for the longest-running play in history.
That kind of inside info about Christie and her work is helpful to get the most out of See How They Run (which was produced as a way of circumventing that real-life contractual clause), but it’s just an added bonus for a story that is lively and entertaining on its own. All of the flashy showbiz players are secondary to the main characters, two Scotland Yard officers who are called in to investigate Kopernick’s murder, which occurs during a party celebrating the 100th performance of The Mousetrap.
Sam Rockwell and Saoirse Ronan play a classic mismatched pair of detectives, one a jaded veteran and the other a wide-eyed rookie. Rockwell’s Inspector George Stoppard is an alcoholic outcast who’s saddled with the Kopernick case while his colleagues are all busy tracking a serial killer. He’s also saddled with the overeager Constable Stalker (Ronan), a go-getter who is so determined to solve the crime that she becomes convinced that each new suspect they interrogate must be the killer.
Rockwell and Ronan have an amusing dynamic that is the movie’s most reliable source of comedy, and it’s especially refreshing to see Ronan in such a lighthearted role given the heavy dramas she typically appears in. Everyone in the cast is clearly having a great time, whether that’s Harris Dickinson (as The Mousetrap star Richard Attenborough) and Shirley Henderson (as Christie herself) getting to playfully tweak the reputations of well-known real people, or Brody and David Oyelowo (as the Mousetrap movie’s stuffy screenwriter) spoofing familiar film-industry types.
The mystery in See How They Run may not be as tightly plotted or twist-filled as an actual Christie mystery, but it’s still intriguing enough to keep the plot moving, and the movie is full of winking jabs at the conventions of murder mysteries, especially onscreen. Oyelowo’s screenwriter derides the use of flashbacks just before the movie launches into a flashback, and Kopernick storyboards a Mousetrap finale that’s dismissed as too sensationalistic — only to play out in the climax of the movie itself.
The filmmakers even take a jab at the provision against adapting The Mousetrap by including brief snippets from the play itself when the characters witness a performance. There may never be a movie version of The Mousetrap, but given how thoroughly See How They Run deconstructs it, maybe there doesn’t ever need to be.
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Josh Bell is a freelance writer and movie/TV critic based in Las Vegas. He has written about movies, TV, and pop culture for Vulture, IndieWire, Tom’s Guide, Inverse, Crooked Marquee, and more. With comedian Jason Harris, he co-hosts the podcast Awesome Movie Year.