See How They Run film review — Saoirse Ronan brings life to a rickety murder mystery

Save your pity for John Woolf, the late British film producer whose career encompassed a string of lucrative hits through the 1950s and 1960s. The African Queen and Oliver! were his, but he also struck the most luckless deal in cinema history — buying the rights to Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap in 1956.

At the time, few bets could have been safer: the transformation of West End smash into big-screen cash cow subject only to the contractual small print that a movie could not be made until six months after the stage production ended. Of course, 66 years later, the world’s longest running play remains in situ off Shaftesbury Avenue. And so instead we have See How They Run, a rickety comic hymn to whodunnits everywhere, built around the legend of Christie’s juggernaut.

Woolf himself is a supporting character, played by Reece Shearsmith, part of a vast ensemble, the plot lightly dipped in actual events. As we begin, the deal is newly signed, the play still only 100 performances in, the star a speechifying Richard Attenborough (Harris Dickinson). The rest is fiction, though the edges are blurred. British desire for Hollywood glitz sees Woolf hire a swinish American director. Real-life transatlanticism finds Adrien Brody cast to play him. Another Los Angeles exile, Sam Rockwell, is a scuffed Scotland Yard detective inspector, Saoirse Ronan his chipper protégé, the pair called into action after a backstage murder.

Casting Ronan and Brody suggests the film taking aim at the just-so symmetries of Wes Anderson, the actors having co-starred in Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel. Yet the energy proves altogether more farcical. Doors slam in faces, drunks slide down walls, wisecracks put an elbow in your ribs. But later, another mystery: the jokes simply vanish. More than one scene ends in a fizzle, as if the actors had misplaced the page with the punchline. Among a mixed bag of performances, Rockwell looks haunted by his miscasting, sinking into his overcoat like a man trying to hide inside his own costume.

Yet even the most joyless critic may have to admit they still had a good time. Hand most of the kudos to Ronan, doing endless heavy lifting to give a lumpy script an airy soufflé bounce. But credit too for the sheer vim of director Tom George. Enough affection for period, place and genre runs through his movie to drown out — just about — the creaks and clanks.

★★★☆☆

In UK cinemas from September 9 and US cinemas from September 16