Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie: fascinating documentary captures the author’s courage and humour in the wake of a brutal attack

“To be famous for the wrong thing is a terrible fate,” Salman Rushdie told an interviewer in 2002. He was referring to the fatwa calling for his execution, issued by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989, after Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses had inflamed anger in the Muslim world. Rushdie has long lamented the way the fatwa has overshadowed his literary achievements, but as he sat down for an onstage interview in Chautauqua, New York, on 12 August 2022, he almost felt liberated from the weight of Khomeini’s decree. “I had just about managed it,” he wrote in his 2024 memoir Knife. “When the last few books were published, people finally stopped asking me about The Satanic Verses. And now here I am, dragged back into that unwanted subject.”

In a frenzied 27-second attack, a young man named Hadi Matar stabbed Rushdie 15 times before being restrained and arrested. Rushdie wrote Knife in the aftermath of this incident, and it forms the basis for Alex Gibney’s Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie, with the author reading extracts as voiceover narration. “We need to document this, that was perhaps my first coherent thought,” Rushdie recalls thinking after the attack. “We want to make a record, because it’s not just about me. It’s about freedom. It’s about the ability to say your truth.”

Knife primarily consists of footage shot by Rushdie’s wife, the poet and novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths, who is credited as the film’s cinematographer. She spares us little as she documents her husband’s scars. The attacker’s knife plunged into Rushdie’s right eye, and the sight of his discoloured and distended eyeball bulging out of its socket is truly shocking. Rushdie recalls dreaming of the eye injuries in Un chien andalou (1929) and Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon (1902), two of the many film classics that Gibney uses to add colour to his documentary.

The love between Rushdie and Griffiths – whose tearful confessionals to the camera are deeply moving – is tangible, and their fortitude as he begins the process of recovery gives the film its emotional throughline, but Gibney also digs into the author’s past to explore how he ended up here. We see a young Rushdie in the early 1980s, making a living in advertising and yet to discover his authorial voice. A rejuvenating visit to his homeland of India led to the success of Midnight’s Children (1981) and Shame (1983). Then came The Satanic Verses.

The footage that Gibney draws on to recreate this era is compelling, and it’s astonishing to recall how vociferous the reaction to The Satanic Verses was. There were riots across the world; bookshops were firebombed; the Italian translator was attacked, the Japanese translator killed. Throughout it all, Rushdie maintained the novelist’s right of imagination and freedom of expression, as he does to this day; but – in stark contrast to the widespread support that followed the 2022 attack – Knife reminds us that not everyone was in his corner. John Berger, Germaine Greer, Roald Dahl and former US president Jimmy Carter are named as prominent critics, and Gibney includes a fascinating clip of the then-recent Islamic convert Cat Stevens trying to defend a death threat against a fellow artist because Rushdie was “irresponsible with his freedom of speech”.

Gibney’s marshalling of archive footage is superb, but he is on less sure ground with some of his expressive choices. An attempt to bring Rushdie’s books to life, their text appearing over animated sequences, is ineffective, and the author’s boldest gambit in Knife – an imagined conversation with his would-be assassin – feels flat and truncated in Gibney’s handling. However, the director builds toward an extremely powerful climax.

Having opened Knife with a recreation of Rushdie’s perspective as he fought his attacker, Gibney ends it with the real thing, showing us what the Chautauqua Institution’s cameras captured on that day. It’s horrifying to watch a bloodied Rushdie stagger backwards as a blade is thrust into him, but Gibney intercuts this with Rushdie’s cathartic visit to the same building a year later, to stand in the spot where he came within centimetres of death. His triumph is a remarkable one, and while he may be correct that his legacy as a writer will never escape the shadow of his notoriety, it’s clear from watching Knife that Rushdie should also be celebrated for his courage, his humour, and his steadfast belief that language is the most potent weapon of all.

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