Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie review: 'a tough watch'
Alex Gibney’s film reinforces the extent to which Salman Rushdie has lived his life not as a victim of extremism, but as a rigorous defender of free speech, writes Alistair Harkness
Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie (15) ★★★★
Prolific documentary maker Alex Gibney’s latest film Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie is many things. On the one hand it’s a moving and graphic first person account of Rushdie’s recovery from the shocking knife attack that nearly ended his life at a literary festival in Chautauqua, New York in August 2022. Made almost painfully intimate by the abundance of unflinching footage shot from his hospital bed by his wife – the poet, novelist and photographer Eliza Griffiths – this aspect of the film is a tough watch, particularly the close-ups of his scarred body and the eye that was stabbed.
But the film is also an adaptation of Rushdie’s own 2024 memoir of almost the same name, so we get lots of wry voice-over mediations that provide levity too. As the author riffs on depictions of knives in popular culture, for instance, Gibney mixes in clips from Psycho, Knife in the Water and – steel yourself – the eye-slicing scene from Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali’s surrealist short Un Chien Andalou to illustrate the way Rushdie’s brain and playful imagination have helped him make sense of what happened to him.
Gradually, though, the film becomes an anatomy of the crime itself. Early on Gibney starts cutting in archival footage detailing the controversy surrounding Rushdie’s 1988 novel The Satanic Verses. Building up a comprehensive primer on the personal, political and cultural fall-out of the fatwa issued against him for the novel’s perceived blasphemy, it provides context for the attack, which was carried out by a radicalised 24-year-old who hadn’t read his work or even been alive when The Satanic Verses was published.
Eventually, of course, we get the attack itself, with Gibney going through the security camera and phone footage frame by frame, like the Maysles brothers did with the knife attack in the Rolling Stones documentary Gimme Shelter. It’s chilling stuff, but juxtaposed with Rushdie revisiting the scene where it happened, it reinforces the extent to which he’s lived his life not as a victim of extremism, but as a rigorous defender of free speech, which is ultimately what the film’s really about.
Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie is in cinemas from 30 September
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