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Based on Salman Rushdie’s memoir of the same name and narrated by the novelist, Knife dives into the 2022 attempt on his life in a packed upstate New York amphitheatre. The brutal attack resulted in a prolonged recovery, with Rushdie losing the sight in his right eye and the use of one hand. Structured around his poet wife Rachel Eliza Griffiths’ video diaries from the hospital, Alex Gibney’s documentary serves as an intimate portrait of a celebrity author famous more for sensationalist headlines than even his era-defining literature.
Opening with the stabbing, Knife plays out as a hallucinatory fever dream as the injured Rushdie looks back at the creative choices that lead him here. A brief flashback to his birth and upbringing in India is followed by his fame (and infamy) in the UK when his universally banned-and-burned novel The Satanic Verses invoked a fatwa (legal ruling) on on a point of Islamic law from Iran in lieu of his allegedly blasphemous retelling of Prophet Muhammad’s life.
Workaholic documentarian Gibney – his next film is the four-hour-long Elon Musk doc – incorporates smartly curated archive material from that heated era that capture a younger Rushdie aggressively defending free speech and some scarily fascinating effigy-burning protests against him from the UK to Iran to Pakistan.
The best archival bits humanise Rushdie as a man in hiding. It’s fascinating to see him in the ’90s, slouched in front of the telly in an undisclosed safe house and playing video games as ‘a master of the Nintendo machine’.
Rushdie’s film and music tastes are also sprinkled with cheeky visual cues. His eye surgeries are intercut with the eyeball-slicing scene from Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou. Elsewhere, an old interview with Yusuf Stevens finds the singer calling Rushdie ‘irresponsible with his freedom of speech’, ironically cued with Stevens’ Moonshadow lyric: ‘And if I ever lose my eyes… I won’t have to cry no more.’ Even more amusing is a grainy clip from 1990 Pakistani action film International Guerrillas that frames its Rushdie stand-in as an Israeli agent who is burned alive by four flying Qurans. Even South Park couldn’t make it up.
Even South Park couldn’t make it up
It’s only a shame then that Knife feels slightly overlong when it moves to the present day. Rushdie’s recovery provides some witty voiceovers and wholesome conversations with his wife, but the near-hagiographic framing grows monotonous and self-indulgent.
And Gibney shows little interest in understanding the psyche of the now-28-year-old would-be assassin Hadi Matar, a man so blinded by spite and extremism that he’d barely glanced at The Satanic Verses before he picked up the knife. Understandably, Rushdie refuses to refer to him by his name, referring to him an ‘ass’ or simply ‘A’.
A recreation of Rushdie having a brief chat with ‘A’ behind bars is cut with a clip from Akira Kurosawa’s crime classic High and Low when the wealthy businessman crosses paths with the blue-collar kidnapper. Much like this well-intentioned but strange homage, Knife yields mixed results when it attempts to be an incisive anatomy of the stabbing. But as a testimony of a writer surviving hate, Gibney’s doc is still colourful and inspiring.
In UK and Ireland cinemas Wed Sep 30.