Dir Alex Gibney | Doc 2026
Reviewed by Ian Long
“You were lucky,” one of Salman Rushdie’s doctors told the slashed and punctured author shortly after the violent attack on him at the Chatauqua Institution in August 2022. Rushdie was at this time prone and helpless on a bed in UPMC Hamot Hospital, Erie, Pennsylvania; disoriented, dazed with sedatives, just about hanging on.
Understandably, he wanted to know exactly why he was lucky. The medic explained that his would-be murderer obviously didn’t have the faintest idea how to kill someone with a knife.
Even so, he gave it a pretty good go. Rushdie was stabbed 15 times in an attack which lasted just 27 seconds, before the Assailant (wrily abbreviated by Rushdie to ‘the Ass,’ or just ‘the A’) was overpowered by an eccentric convergence of security guards and book fans. The ‘Ass’ had been working out in a New Jersey boxing club for four months prior to the attack, ensuring that the blade-thrusts he landed on anunarmed, unprepared man fifty years his senior would be good and deep, inexpert or not.
‘Knife’ is not a reconstruction or docudrama. The first section,mostly comprised of phone footage captured by Rushdie’s wife, the writer and artist Rachel Eliza Griffiths, puts us in his hospital room a few days after the attack, when he was no longer on a ventilator. Rather than shying away from his wounds, she lingers on them, pushes right up to them. She wants us to know exactly what was done to her husband. It’s raw and shockingly intimate.
We see the deep, stapled slash to his lower jaw and throat, which almost severed his carotid artery; his left hand, with its severed tendons; the foot-long emergency laparotomy incision running up his belly, which allowed doctors to access his damaged liver; and, most upsetting of all, his ruined right eye, angry and sightless, the dry cornea standing out from his face as if on a stalk.
A man smitten by stories, Rushdie recounts his hospital dream of playing chess with Death in ‘The Seventh Seal.’ It’s the first of many film-clips which he uses to find some context forhis experience. Transformed by imagination, knives become metaphors, not always negative ones. The detective stabbed on the staircase in ‘Psycho’, the sliced eye in ‘Un Chien Andalou’, the agonising stitching of eyelids in ‘The Diving Bell and the Butterfly’; but also Henry Fonda jabbing a switchblade into a table-top in ’12 Angry Men’, calling guilt into question.
Inevitably, ‘Knife’ serves as a reminder of the sheer strangeness of Rushdie’s life. What’s it like to become a geopolitical phenomenon, an ‘icon of hate’? To know that a fair percentage of the world’s two billion Muslims want you dead, and that many would do the job themselves, given the chance? To feel the weight of all that animosity, to navigate, evade, try to forget, be forced to confront it for decades, while trying to be a creative writer, and to have some kind of personal, family, romantic life? How much resilience do you need to get through all that?
As I watched, I was conscious of an uncanny quality that I couldn’t quite pin down. Then I realised that the film has all the hallmarks of a posthumous biography (which it easily could have been; Rushdie’s trauma surgeons didn’t initially expect him to survive). Instead of the reminiscences of friends and family, though, here’s Rushdie himself, equal parts whimsical, idealistic dreamer, clear-eyed autobiographer and worldly entrepreneur, speaking to us directly, telling us what he went through, delivering his own eulogy while formulating his next move.
Conversely, Khomeini’s fatwa really was the last gasp of a dying man. The Inviolable One was 86 when he pronounced it, and died a few months later. A power-play hijacking the grievance culture of political Islam and positioning Iran at itshelm with Rushdie as sacrificial pawn, its success is, sadly,still globally evident. Equally sadly, the Imam didn’t get to know about the 18 books its subject published after his death sentence, or its botched and craven enactment, 34 years on.
The end of the film loops back to its beginning: a spry,restored Rushdie revisits the airy auditorium of the Chatauqua Institution and mounts the stage where ‘the Ass’ barged intohis event. Now, startlingly, we see the brutal footage of the attack as Rushdie paces out the scenario, exorcising the chaotic events while mapping them. Again, there’s a ghostly frisson, this time from witnessing a living man standing at the site of his own (intended) death.
The film is a testament of personal survival and recovery on the most basic level. But it also records the victory of a single, vulnerable but indomitable human being against a corrupt, vindictive and ultimately barren ideology, which is something worth celebrating.
A one night screening on 30 September | IN UK CINEMAS from 2 October 2026