SEE HOW THEY RUN
★★★★ OUT NOW / CERT 12A / 98 MINS
DIRECTOR Tom George
CAST Sam Rockwell, Saoirse Ronan, David Oyelowo
See How They Run is built on a simple but delicious premise: a whodunnit buried inside an actual whodunnit, in this case Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap. It not only gives Tom George’s film many genres to satirise — it’s a backstage drama, crime potboiler and police procedural, all wrapped up in a farce — but allows for a knowing, self-referential quality that brings the conceits and conventions of the murder-mystery to the fore. It doesn’t completely work, but it is fast, funny and frequently stylish, topped off with great work by Sam Rockwell as world-weary Inspector Stoppard and Saoirse Ronan as greenhorn WPC Stalker. They make such an enjoyable duo, in fact, that the further investigations of Stoppard and Stalker would be very much welcome.