Dir. Alex Gibney · 2026 · 107 min · in cinemas
On 12 August 2022 Salman Rushdie walked onto a stage at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York to talk about writers in exile, and was stabbed repeatedly by a man in the audience. Gibney's film is built on the memoir Rushdie wrote about it, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, and Rushdie reads from that book as the narrator. The structure is a loop: the recovery in the present, then back through the decades before it, to The Satanic Verses, the fatwa and the years under police protection.
The voice. Reviewers keep coming back to the effect of hearing a man narrate his own attempted murder, dry and unsentimental, with the black humour intact. It makes the film feel closer to an adaptation of his testimony than to an investigation, and that is its strength.
The material around the voice is strong too. Critics single out the hospital footage shot by his wife, the writer Rachel Eliza Griffiths, as intimate without being exploitative, and the archive of the fatwa years, with its riots and bookshop firebombings, as startling to watch now.
The film also holds back. Accounts describe drawings standing in for the violence while it follows the hospital stay and rehabilitation, with the footage of the attack itself saved until late. Gibney mixes the memoir with photographs, film clips and animation, and the result moves between the recovery and the decades before it rather than marching in a straight line.
A vibrant testament to the intellectual life of its subject.
David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter
The critics who hold back do so for specific reasons, and they are worth weighing. Time Out's reviewer finds the present-day stretches slightly overlong and the framing close to hagiography, and notes that the film shows little interest in the mind of the attacker. Rooney also felt it runs a fraction long. RogerEbert.com's reviewer, otherwise warm, calls the inserted clips from classic films a lazy device. The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw, as quoted in a round-up, calls the film excellent, and neither he nor Sight and Sound's Philip Concannon is quoted raising these complaints. That is where the verdicts split.
Peter Bradshaw has also noted what the film leaves out: Rushdie's 1990 claim to have embraced Islam, which he later retracted, goes unmentioned. A recreated sequence imagines the attacker's perspective, and Time Out found the film's cinematic homages gave mixed results.
It is also, by design, one man's account. If you want a sceptical, multi-sided investigation, this is not that film.
Readers of the memoir, anyone who followed the fatwa years only from the headlines, and viewers who want a documentary about what it costs to keep writing. It is not an easy watch: reviewers describe the injuries, including the loss of sight in one eye, as shocking.
Reported as opening in UK and Irish cinemas on 2 October 2026, after earlier festival and US screenings. Availability varies by country, so check your local listings.