Film review: Saoirse Ronan heads up an effective Agatha Christie homage in See How They Run

"Ronan yet again demonstrates a deceptively light touch when it comes to deadpan humour"

Sam Rockwell and Saoirse Ronan in See How They Run

• See How They Run 
• ★★★★☆

Art imitates life imitating art in See How They Run (12A), which opens in London in the early 1950s with the murder of the obnoxious American movie producer Leo Kopernick (Adrien Brody).

His corpse, which is discovered on the stage of Agatha Christie’s murder-mystery play The Mousetrap, puts a stop to all the fictional murder that has made The Mousetrap a West End phenomenon. Enter Inspector Stoppard (Sam Rockwell) and WPC Stalker (Saoirse Ronan), whose task it is to identify Kopernick’s murderer from a rogues’ gallery that includes the matinee idol Dickie Attenborough (Harris Dickinson), the impresario Petula Spencer (Ruth Wilson), film director John Woolf (Reece Shearsmith) and the highly strung playwright Mervyn Cocker-Norris (David Oyelowo), all of whom have very good reasons to want Kopernick dead.

What follows is a smart homage to Agatha Christie’s mysteries, and one that is deliciously funny into the bargain. Writer Tom Chappell and director Tom George have tremendous fun sending up the tropes of the Golden Age of Mystery by delivering the proverbial shoal of suspects and red herrings, although it’s equally merciless in its depiction of the cutthroat world of the theatre: actors, producers, writers and directors are all lampooned for their greed, vanity and narcissistic excess.

All of which, of course, makes for hugely satisfying viewing, and that’s before we get to the best part, which is the superb chemistry between Saoirse Ronan and Sam Rockwell in the leading roles.

The cynical, slovenly Stoppard and the enthusiastically naïve Stalker make for an enjoyable mismatched pair of investigators, with Ronan yet again demonstrating a deceptively light touch when it comes to deadpan humour, and they get strong support from David Oyelowo, Harris Dickinson (even if he’s about two feet too tall to play the real Dickie Attenborough), and Adrien Brody, who pulls off a neat homage to Sunset Boulevard by narrating his own murder.

(cinema release)