[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for See How They Run.]
So, as stated above, this article will reveal the “who” in the new Searchlight Pictures whodunnit See How They Run, which may or may not be sooner than director Tom George likes. “I strongly believe in no spoilers, but I believe that spoilers should have a statute of limitation, and we can discuss what that length is,” George tells Consequence. “I don’t think people can expect you not to hold on to a spoiler indefinitely throughout time. But yeah, don’t spoil the ending, you want people to have that same buzz you had the first time you watched it.”
George knows this from personal experience, after a friend of his spoiled The Sixth Sense for him. “We were watching the trailer on TV, he had seen the film, and I said, ‘What is Bruce Willis’s character?’ And the correct answer was, ‘He’s a social worker.’ But he went, ‘Oh, he’s a ghost.’ And I was like ‘That’s insane, that you would say that to me.’ So yeah, so I’ve been bitten, and it rather took a shine off The Sixth Sense.”
So hopefully you’re only reading this piece after watching the 1950s murder mystery See How They Run, in which Inspector Stoppard (Sam Rockwell) and Constable Stalker (Saoirse Ronan) work to figure out who killed movie director Leo Köpernick (Adrian Brody) backstage at the Ambassadors Theater, where Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap has just completed its 100th performance.
There are plenty of suspects surrounding the not-well-liked Köpernick, including producer Petula Spencer (Ruth Wilson) and screenwriter Mervyn Cocker-Norris (David Oyelowo), but the true culprit turns out to be the extremely tall and everpresent usher Dennis (Charlie Cooper), who wants to shut down The Mousetrap because the plot of the play borrows directly from the tragic story of his own family.
For Cooper, whodunnits are a genre where “you don’t realize how much you love it until you’re involved in it. I grew up watching whodunnits on TV, and it’s such a part of British culture, you know, that Agatha Christie thing. It’s such a strong part of our makeup, I think we know a lot more about it than we think we do. And it’s just such a classic format, isn’t it? It’s something you can’t help but be absorbed by. It’s such a great thing to be a part of, actually.”