"It is far from comfortable viewing at times – we are shown the full attack come the end after initially only seeing snapshots of the build-up and aftermath throughout"

When Salman Rushdie was violently stabbed in August 2022, there was a sense of sad irony and perhaps depressing inevitability about the attack. Following the publication of his renowned novel The Satanic Verses in 1988, Rushdie has had to live much of his life with increased security under the cloud of death threats, including famously, a Fatwa. He was giving a talk about the importance of writers being kept safe when the incident occurred and he emerged with serious injuries, although mercifully still alive; as one doctor told him afterwards, it was, for want of a better word, fortunate his attacker did not know how to utilize a knife to actually kill someone.


Following his recovery, he wrote and published the memoir Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, a haunting, often disturbing, sometimes humorous but ultimately uplifting book that, given much of his work sits in the genre of magical realism, may be his most accessible publication yet.


Acclaimed director Alex Gibney has now turned that into a documentary feature yet whilst he has kept much of the prose, he has also managed to create something that works as a fantastic companion piece to the source.


Central to the film is footage of Rushdie’s journey from hospitals to rehab to home before culminating in a return to the Chautauqua Amphitheater where the attack happened. Shot by Rushdie’s wife Rachel Eliza Griffiths (clearly a skilled camera operator and rightly credited as D.P. here) it paints an intimate and raw depiction of recovery, highlighting challenges Rushdie had to overcome whilst not shying away from the more graphic aspects of the horrific injuries suffered. That the footage was not shot directly for the documentary per se, simply enhances its impact.


Contrasting this intimate portrait is historical footage of the fallout of the publication of The Satanic Verses, that would ultimately – 34 years later – lead to the attempted murder. Equally compelling are the animated sequences and use of classic cinema, somewhat in the style of Slavoj Žižek, which enhance the experience (although the use of the infamous scene from Un Chien Andalou is even harder to watch in this context).


Rushdie talks in archive interviews in a calm, assured way, contrasting the vitriolic hatred that he had to endure. In a world of outrage and protest where free speech is often debated and queried, Rushdie was and remains a calm voice of reason.

And it is that calm voice that provides much of the fascinating narration around the meditations of what happened as he considers his attacker (he ultimately feels little more than ambivalence towards him), contemplates the remarkable power of the human body to heal itself and reaches a satisfying conclusion to this particular chapter of his life.


It is far from comfortable viewing at times – we are shown the full attack come the end after initially only seeing snapshots of the build-up and aftermath throughout – and on occasion can be a tad repetitive (and subsequently a little long). Yet that from such a disturbing and terrifying ordeal can come a moving memoir and now film is an inspiration for us all in these times.