‘See How They Run’ or — Disproportionally Annoying?

How on earth can something so lightweight, so harmless, so happy to entertain, so inoffensive, so breezy, so slight end up being so insufferably annoying?!

‘See How They Run’ (2022) is a loving pastiche of Agatha Christie whodunits filled with unthreatening humour, colourful characters and a mysterious murder. The massive problem is that the humour is so laboured, so forced that it undercuts any, if not all, of the tension and, ironically, all the humour as well meaning the film works as neither a comedy nor a murder mystery never mind trying to succeed at being both. And boy god, it’s annoying.

Saoirse Ronan’s an absolute delight to watch and fortunately she’s on screen a lot but everything else around her did nothing for me other than seriously grate on my nerves. And god knows what Sam Rockwell was doing with his vocal chords throughout all this.

Yet what’s so infuriating is just how rabidly innocuous it all is and how irrationally intense my reaction to it was. It’s like taking a spoonful of soufflé, finding it not quite to your liking so then smashing the entire bowl against the wall in a fit of furious rage. It’s utterly disproportionate and that just pisses me off even more.

I think the blame must rest with director Tom George who obviously wants to be Wes Anderson which is a problem for me because, with the exception of ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’, I can’t STAND Wes Anderson so I was sitting on my sofa and shouting at my TV — ‘See! This is what comes of us allowing Anderson to get away with his overly symmetrical shit for all these years. We end up with knock-off, wanna-be crap like this! We’ve only got ourselves to blame and now we’re reaping the whirlwind.’

God this film was annoying and provoked in me an intensely irrational negative emotional reaction towards it I haven’t experienced since I watched ‘Peter’s Friends’ (1992).