See How They Run

There are so many new releases this weekend and I want to see most of them!  I'm a little bit behind but I started with See How They Run at the Broadway last night and, as a huge fan of Agatha Christie, I really enjoyed it!  While the cast and crew celebrate the 100th performance of Agatha Christie's play The Mousetrap in London's West End, Leo Kopernick (Adrien Brody), a sleazy Hollywood director trying to adapt the play into a film, is killed by a mysterious man in a dark overcoat and a felt hat.  The cynical and often inebriated Inspector Stoppard (Sam Rockwell) and the eager but prone to jumping to conclusions Constable Stalker (Saoirse Ronan) are sent to investigate.  As they interview the stars of the play, Richard Attenborough (Harris Dickinson) and Sheila Sim (Pearl Chanda), theatre impresario Petula Spencer (Ruth Wilson), film producer John Woolf (Reece Shearsmith), and screenwriter Mervyn Cocker-Norris (David Oyelowo), they realize that everyone had a motive to kill him.  When all of the suspects arrive at the estate of Dame Agatha Christie (Shirley Henderson) and her husband Captain Mallowan (Lucian Msamati), it seems as if life is imitating art with a resolution similar to The Mousetrap but then it becomes even more meta!  This is a hilarious spoof of the whodunit genre (it works better as a spoof than it does as a murder mystery) with lots of Easter eggs from the theatre world and Christie's works, my favorite being when a character breaks the fourth wall at the end to admonish the audience not to reveal the murderer (just as characters do in the play).  I loved the glamorous 1950s London aesthetic in the production design, especially the clothes, cars, theatres, and hotels.  Ronan is fantastic with great comedic timing and Rockwell is a lot of fun as her straight man but the entire cast is outstanding (I loved Oyelowo and his mustache).  I had a lot of fun with this but your enjoyment might depend on knowing a little bit about The Mousetrap (I saw it last year at HCT).