SEE HOW THEY RUN

On London’s West End, the long-running play The Mousetrap is a hit and Hollywood comes knocking at the stage door. Arrogant American director, Leo Kopernick (Adrien Brody), blacklisted in the U.S., gets the job to adapt the murder mystery to the screen with a script by Mervyn Cocker-Norris (David Oyelowo). However, anticipating all eventualities, that shrewd matriarch of mystery known here only as the Dame (Shirley Henderson) has inserted a caveat in her contract: the producers can’t film the play until six months after its theatrical run ends.

As actual corpses begin piling up backstage, a cynical Scotland Yard detective Inspector Stoppard (Sam Rockwell) and an enthusiastic newbie Constable Stalker (Saoirse Ronan) have to reconcile their personal differences on the way to identifying the killer. Turning adversity into opportunity, Director Tom George, writer Mark Chappell and the production team shot the movie in the theaters and hotels abandoned during the city’s pandemic shutdown, and set a playful tone as an antidote to dark times and to celebrate the life of the theater.