Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie review – A clarion call for love to overcome hate

When Sir Salman Rushdie attended the Chautauqua Institution in leafy upstate New York to give a public lecture in August 2022, no one expected that vast amphitheatre to be the scene of a vicious, near-fatal knife attack from a New Jersey loner. After all, the writer had been living in the United States for decades, free from the fatwa imposed on him by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989 and the subsequent round-the-clock police protection.

In this extraordinarily powerful documentary, prolific film-maker Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side, The Armstrong Lie) chronicles the days, weeks and months of recovery for the stricken author, and includes never-previously-seen footage provided by Rushdie’s wife, the American poet and visual artist Rachel Eliza Griffiths, who is rightly credited as co-cinematographer.

Indeed, it is her decision on day six of his time in a hospital bed while heavily sedated after life-saving surgery, to document the aftermath of that furious 27-second assault, laying the foundation for Gibney’s movingly intimate and inspirational film.

But, be warned, it is unsparing and harrowing, too, with 15 stab wounds to her husband’s cheek, chest, neck and thigh resulting in multiple stitches and staples perforating his body, although it is the graphic injury to his right eye that is declared "the cruellest blow".

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Once the road to rehabilitation begins – the patient is mobile by day 14 - Gibney deftly dovetails between Rushdie’s reflections on the incident ("Why didn’t I fight?") and the highs and lows of his life since leaving India as a teenager. This includes his university education in England, literary acclaim for his 1981 Booker Prize-winning Midnight’s Children, marriage, divorce - all leading to the international furore that erupted after the 1988 publication of The Satanic Verses, when riots and book-burning took place across the country.

Here, Rushdie makes the perfect narrator, eruditely reminiscing over those days, even suggesting the Iranian leader had not read the controversial tome and was using it to deflect from troubles at home. However, in contrast to the understandably incandescent fury of wife Rachel, it is his remarkable sang-froid and humour as he recalls the 2022 ordeal and the perpetrator’s actions that are staggering.

As documented in his 2024 memoir Knife, Rushdie wryly refuses to utter the individual’s name, preferring to label him as that "asinine man", "the attacker", or most minimally of all, "the A". Also inspired by the book and animated in the film, is an imagined meeting in prison between victim and culprit, in which Rushdie defiantly questions the horribly intimate use of that particular weapon in the assault. "The knife had severed me from my world."

What is common to both the fatwa years and what happened in 2022 is that a war on words is still pervasive and requires a response. Infuriating archive footage revealing Roald Dahl, Germaine Greer and Cat Stevens showing no solidarity with Rushdie after he was forced into hiding in the late '80s is a sobering moment but is leavened by support in the US from the likes of director Wes Anderson in the present.

For it is not just the blows to the author’s body but to the ability of writers and artists to express themselves without fear of violent retribution that permeates Gibney’s profoundly affecting account.

And then there is the return to the scene of the crime when Salman and Rachel revisit the lecture hall to find their closure. It is also the point when the reality of the stabbing is revealed in alarming footage from that fateful day in Chautauqua.

A clarion call for freedom of expression, then, but also for love to overcome hate.

Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie is out now in cinemas.

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