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Because the creator Salman Rushdie remembers it, the primary clear thought that got here to him after the brutal 2022 knife assault that nearly took his life was easy: “We have to doc this.” Happily, Rushdie’s beloved spouse, fellow author and multidisciplinary artist Rachel Eliza Griffiths, was available with a fierce dedication and a brand new digital camera. (Griffiths remembers her tackle the concept to doc the after-effects of the assault with just a little extra chew: “We mentioned that we wish everybody to see.”)
And see we do in Alex Gibney’s “Knife: The Tried Homicide of Salman Rushdie,” which mixes Griffiths’ footage (she is credited as one of many movie‘s cinematographers; she can also be its true coronary heart) with archival materials, new animations, tons of film clips, and Rushdie’s personal work (principally from his 2024 memoir “Knife: Mediations After an Tried Homicide,” however with a lot from his seminal “The Satanic Verses”). Gibney’s movie doesn’t ease into it in any respect, opening with a clip of the assault, squarely dropping us into the horror of it. Rushdie supplies voiceover all through, and there’s a right away affect from listening to a person narrate his personal tried homicide, and with such a relaxed (and infrequently darkly humorous) demeanor.
Griffiths faithfully totes her digital camera to the Pennsylvania hospital Rushdie is airlifted to after the assault on the Chautauqua Establishment in upstate New York. When she and Rushdie aren’t fearlessly documenting the staggering scope of Rushdie’s accidents (and, sure, that features quite a few photographs of his proper eye, which was hit in the course of the assault and which he now not has use of), Griffiths is hunkering down for solo interviews that take us straight into the guts of their love and her profound grief.
However to know why Rushdie was stabbed that day, we should additionally perceive a narrative that unfolded greater than three many years in the past, after which even additional again, to his personal childhood in India. Gibney unspools an formidable, three-pronged timeline that mixes and mingles all through the documentary, together with the quick aftermath of the assault, Rushdie’s youth and early years of writing, and what occurred in 1988 after the publication of his “Satanic Verses.”
Whereas many will keep in mind that Rushdie was the topic of a fatwa from the Ayatollah Khomeini due to the contents of the e book, which some Muslims believed was blasphemous towards Islam and the prophet Muhammad specifically, Gibney’s movie powerfully catapults us again to 1988 and 1989 and the intense fervor across the name to homicide the creator. Archival footage illustrates, in pulse-pounding and nerve-rattling trend, simply how widespread requires Rushdie’s homicide have been. Not simply in Iran, however so far as Belgium, his personal adopted hometown of London, even New York Metropolis. Bookstores that carried it have been firebombed. Folks related to its publication have been crushed, some even killed. Rushdie went into hiding and remained beneath police supervision for practically a decade.
The person who attacked Rushdie wasn’t even born when the fatwa was enforce, and whereas Rushdie principally doesn’t wish to discuss concerning the assailant, referring to him merely as “the A,” the doc ultimately works as much as a sequence of imagined conversations between the lads. Such convos additionally seem in Rushdie’s memoir, and have the weird impact of constructing us really feel a distance from our topic and narrator after they seem within the latter half of the movie. The fact of the scenario is way more fascinating, way more private.
Rushdie himself didn’t know the complete extent of his accidents for a lot of weeks after, although we’re confronted with them all through “Knife” — the lengthy line of staples up his abdomen, the severed nerves of his left hand, the huge gash alongside his throat, and naturally his ruined eye — witnesses to this doc, being compelled to actually see what was executed to this man within the identify of God and faith and religion and conviction. The revulsion that we really feel towards this assault is, in fact, baked proper into the movie, however Gibney typically dances away from making it really feel like a symptom of one thing wider. (That “the A” was radicalized partially by YouTube movies is the kind of factor deserving of its personal movie.)
Each the back-and-forth construction of Gibney’s movie and Rushdie’s personal phrases ultimately deliver us round to the concept it’s a chronicle of the numerous instances Rushdie has needed to remake himself (although we enterprise to say that recovering from the assault is a hell of rather a lot more durable than reinventing himself by cameoing in “Bridget Jones’s Diary” in 2001, simply as he was rising from his exile). Every time, one thing new is discovered, however one thing else is actually misplaced.
The round nature of the movie and Rushdie’s personal life is additional cemented in its closing moments, as Rushdie and Griffiths return to the location of his assault greater than a 12 months after it occurred. That alone can be upsetting, however Rushdie, endlessly making an attempt to know the story of his personal life, then walks his spouse and her digital camera via all of the moments earlier than, throughout, and after the assault. Prolonged footage of the assault from all types of angles follows, a lot of it slowed down, horrifying, nonetheless laborious to consider. At one level, the knife itself seems. At many others, we see Rushdie’s face and fingers. He’s reaching, terrified, blood-soaked, however nonetheless alive. And you may’t look away.
Grade: B+
“Knife: The Tried Homicide of Salman Rushdie” premiered on the 2026 Sundance Movie Pageant. It’s at present searching for U.S. distribution.
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