Hold on to your deerstalkers: the whodunnit is back, with its trail of clues, its lineup of suspects and its well-timed doses of British bloody murder. It arrives when the country is sickly, like a bustling matron, to reassure us that evil will out and that justice prevails in the end. The genre abides by its own strict set of rules. Its predictability has become its USP. “It’s a whodunnit,” says the world-weary narrator at the start of See How They Run. “You’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.”
We have long since reached the point where every whodunnit is a whodunnit-this-time, another tour of the same old crime scene. Tom George’s spry, supple See How They Run is smart enough to acknowledge this, with a script that pokes fun at the grinding monotony of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap and a set of characters so schooled in the tropes of the genre that they are practically running on rails.
But that introductory voiceover turns out to be a red herring. Every film format has to adapt to survive. Every period caper is a present-day creature at heart. “There’s a lovely inbuilt tension that comes with combining a period thing with a modern point of view,” George says. “The film is set in 1953, but it only functions if you know the history of murder mysteries. The genre is almost the main character.”
See How They Run – a play within a film, a whodunnit within a whodunnit – is the director’s first feature. George came to it fresh from shooting three seasons of the deadpan mockumentary This Country for the BBC, trailing two jobless cousins around a Cotswolds village. His film imports two of the comedy’s stars (Charlie Cooper and Paul Chahidi). But it also preserves This Country’s air of realism, a loose improvisational quality that serves to oil the plot’s clockwork wheels.
Saoirse Ronan and Sam Rockwell play Stalker and Stoppard, the odd-couple investigators, rattling around a colourful postwar London, where the police cars are the size of ride-on lawnmowers and Singer sewing machines double as convenient murder weapons. The Mousetrap has just completed its 100th performance (barely the first lap of an infinite circle of hell) and there is a corpse in the wings and a backstage crime to be solved. But the real suspect here is the whodunnit itself. The film holds it to the light, probes for holes in its story. The killer’s eventual unmasking is almost by the by.
What made This Country exceptional was the way it undercut our expectations of a fly-on-the-wall documentary. See How They Run tries a similar tack with the hidebound murder mystery. “The rules of the genre provide an extra layer to work with,” George says. “The audience is aware of the conventions. And we’re aware that they’re aware. All of that can add texture and comedy. But it’s a potential trap as well, because you don’t want to come across as too knowing, too arch.” Most people, remember, watch murder mysteries because they love them. “So you don’t want to be taking the piss.”
George makes the genre sound like a part of the furniture or a venerable family member. It is something we laugh at and cherish and run to for comfort; something we have lived alongside for so long that we assume that it has always been around.
The first film whodunnit was probably 1928’s The Last Warning (coincidentally, another backstage theatrical thriller), which was released a couple of years before the term was coined. Over the subsequent decades, the format has dipped in and out of favour: periodically overshadowed by its more psychologically knotty cousins, the howdunnit or the whydunnit; occasionally bumped by the great, godless justdunnit (which paints violence as random, motiveless, devoid of logic). But these films, books and plays have never gone away. “They’re a mainstay,” says George. “There can’t have been a year – certainly in this country – when there hasn’t been an Agatha Christie made.”
Lately, though, we have been more partial than usual. Those in the market for museum-piece Christies are well served by Kenneth Branagh’s big-screen overhauls of Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile. Everyone else, check out Sarah Phelps’ more jagged and interesting BBC adaptations. The author may be uncredited, but she is the presiding spirit behind Rian Johnson’s Knives Out, a jubilant funhouse of a Hollywood thriller, complete with secret stairs and false backs. Christie’s influence can also be felt on the series Only Murders in the Building, about amateur sleuths on the tony Upper West Side of New York City. It is buried deep in the DNA of Halina Reijn’s Bodies Bodies Bodies, a marriage of And Then There Were None and the twentysomething slasher flick. So, See How They Run is not alone; the film is part of an ensemble.
We like whodunnits the most, it seems, when times are tough. We like them because they provide moral clarity and a puzzle that can be solved. We like them because they are a distraction, a palliative, a respite from what the philosopher Charles West Churchman called the “wicked problem” that defies resolution. The so-called “golden age” of 1930s crime fiction coincided with an era of political extremism and economic upheaval. To complete the conditions behind this vintage, just add climate crisis and Covid to the mix.
After speaking with George, I contact the actor David Oyelowo, who plays the preening Mervyn Cocker-Norris, one of the film’s chief suspects. Oyelowo says he was drawn to the production because it promised a break from the norm, a fun diversion, a nostalgic jaunt through London’s theatre scene. The truth, he says, turned out to be more disturbing.
“This film came along in the red-hot eye of the pandemic, when it felt like the world had ended and that making movies and going to plays and simply being around people was no longer possible,” he says. “And the film started shooting in the midst of all that – January 2021 – which became its own adventure. I remember doing the theatre scenes inside the Old Vic, which had been dark for months, and then stepping outside and seeing the streets completely barren. And I kid you not, I found myself thinking: ‘Is this over? Are we ever going to have that theatre experience again?’”
Mark Chappell’s script for See How They Run hinges on a real-life clause in The Mousetrap’s contract that stipulates that a film version can’t be made until the stage play has completed its initial run. The joke here, of course, is that The Mousetrap has never stopped running. It opened at the Ambassadors theatre in 1952, transferred to the St Martin’s next door in 1974 and has been a West End fixture ever since, the greasepaint equivalent of the ravens in the Tower. At least, that was the joke when the script was drafted. The St Martin’s theatre went dark for the first time between March 2020 and May 2021 – right through the making of a film about a play that never stops.
The cast and crew had planned to see The Mousetrap for research before filming began. In the event, that wasn’t possible. Oyelowo reckons he dodged a bullet: “The idea of watching a play that is the longest-running production in history, with a rotating series of actors … It literally gives me an anxiety attack.”
Oyelowo admits that he is a creature of the theatre, “part of that whole luvvie culture”. Even so, he knows his limits. “My first season at the RSC was 18 months long,” he says. “I did three different shows in that time and I was ready to pull my toenails out. So, the claustrophobia of just sitting there and watching those actors and wondering how long they had been on that same stage saying those same lines – I think there was someone who had done it for decades – it would give me a flash of what my own career could have been.”
Ronan has first-hand experience of long runs, too. The Irish actor was in a Broadway production of The Crucible that played for five months; heaped helpings of anguish and darkness, night after night. By the end, she reckons, she was nearly fit to kill.
“The theatre world is very claustrophobic by nature,” she says. “It’s wonderful, but it can also be stressful. You’re seeing the same people every single day for months and you’re doing exactly the same show every single night. And, yes, there are surprises. But there’s a monotony to it that sends you a bit mad. So, it’s very natural for a murder to take place in a theatre.”
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All of which takes us back to the scene of the crime: London, 1953, just off St Martin’s Lane. A Hollywood director has been bludgeoned to death in the wings. Stalker and Stoppard are rounding up all the suspects. But who is the killer? And, crucially, does it matter?
Over the course of the genre’s history, every solution has been tried; there are no fresh angles left. The butler did it. The narrator did it. Everyone did it. No one did it. We require that the murder be explained, because those are the rules and an audience demands closure. But it is a box-ticking exercise, a contractual obligation. Any aficionado will tell you that the least interesting aspect of a whodunnit is who done it. The story is at its most exciting when all the pieces are in the air, when everyone is a suspect and we are invited to meet them, observe them and draw our own conclusions.
Certainly, this is how Ronan sees it. “To me, it’s less about who done it and more about being introduced to all these colourful characters,” she says. “That’s the drama, I suppose, but it’s almost like a soap. The script is basically me and Sam’s character walking around and interviewing people, like you’re doing right now. The actors get a few minutes to shine. And we sit in the corner playing the observer, making notes, like eejits. That’s how these films work, so why mess with the formula?”
Off camera, in the wings, the production followed a similar script. The cast and crew had been cooped up for months. Now, here they were, suddenly part of an ensemble again. They got to hang out, joke around, work out which colleagues they liked and which they did not. After the isolation of lockdown, that in itself felt healthy. Films don’t just offer an escape for the audience. They can provide a respite for the film-makers as well.
Basically, says Ronan, she had a great time. The pandemic was raging, the streets were deserted and they were shooting a film that contained at least two cold-blooded murders. Yet, for the first time in ages, the world made sense – and felt hopeful. “It’s weird, because this film has a really dark underbelly,” she says. “It’s about alcoholism and tragedy and the losses of postwar Britain. But people go to see a movie like this because they know what they’re going to get. In the end, I think, there’s a comfort in that.”
• See How They Run is in UK cinemas from 9 September, and Australian cinemas from 29 September
