Rushdie, with the help of his wife Rachel Eliza Griffiths, bares his scars in the days and weeks after being violently attacked, in this standard but comprehensive portrait of the writer’s life under fire.
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Rachel Eliza Griffiths There’s nothing more distressing in “Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie’ than the unflinching closeups of the author’s wounded body in the days and weeks after August 12, 2022, when he was repeatedly stabbed while on stage at a literary festival in upstate New York. The camera lingers over his mangled hand and the train-track of stitches running up his belly. His right eye is a bloodied bulge. The power of Alex Gibney’s documentary, which premiered at Sundance, lies in Rushdie’s decision to showcase his scars — quite literally, by sharing footage that his wife Rachel Eliza Griffiths shot throughout his time in the hospital. It’s a visceral complement to what is otherwise a solid, if standard, profile of the author from Gibney, the Oscar- and Emmy-winner known for churning out reliably comprehensive, reporter-style investigations of power and politics.
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