‘Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie’ Review: Don’t Look Away from This Staggeringly Intimate Doc

As the author Salman Rushdie remembers it, the first clear thought that came to him after the brutal 2022 knife attack that almost took his life was simple: “We need to document this.” Fortunately, Rushdie’s beloved wife, fellow writer and multidisciplinary artist Rachel Eliza Griffiths, was on hand with a fierce dedication and a new camera. (Griffiths remembers her take on the idea to document the after-effects of the attack with a little more bite: “We said that we want everyone to see.”)

And see we do in Alex Gibney’s “Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie,” which combines Griffiths’ footage (she is credited as one of the film‘s cinematographers; she is also its true heart) with archival material, new animations, tons of movie clips, and Rushdie’s own work (mostly from his 2024 memoir “Knife: Mediations After an Attempted Murder,” but with plenty from his seminal “The Satanic Verses”). Gibney’s film doesn’t ease into it at all, opening with a clip of the attack, squarely dropping us into the horror of it. Rushdie provides voiceover throughout, and there is an immediate impact from hearing a man narrate his own attempted murder, and with such a calm (and often darkly humorous) demeanor.

Griffiths faithfully totes her camera to the Pennsylvania hospital Rushdie is airlifted to after the attack at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York. When she and Rushdie are not fearlessly documenting the staggering scope of Rushdie’s injuries (and, yes, that includes numerous shots of his right eye, which was hit during the attack and which he no longer has use of), Griffiths is hunkering down for solo interviews that take us straight into the heart of their love and her profound grief.

But to understand why Rushdie was stabbed that day, we must also understand a story that unfolded more than three decades ago, and then even further back, to his own childhood in India. Gibney unspools an ambitious, three-pronged timeline that mixes and mingles throughout the documentary, including the immediate aftermath of the attack, Rushdie’s youth and early years of writing, and what happened in 1988 after the publication of his “Satanic Verses.”

While many will remember that Rushdie was the subject of a fatwa from the Ayatollah Khomeini because of the contents of the book, which some Muslims believed was blasphemous against Islam and the prophet Muhammad in particular, Gibney’s film powerfully catapults us back to 1988 and 1989 and the extreme fervor around the call to murder the author. Archival footage illustrates, in pulse-pounding and nerve-rattling fashion, just how widespread calls for Rushdie’s murder were. Not just in Iran, but as far as Belgium, his own adopted hometown of London, even New York City. Bookstores that carried it were firebombed. People associated with its publication were beaten, some even killed. Rushdie went into hiding and remained under police supervision for nearly a decade.

The man who attacked Rushdie wasn’t even born when the fatwa was put into effect, and while Rushdie mostly doesn’t want to talk about the assailant, referring to him simply as “the A,” the doc eventually works up to a series of imagined conversations between the men. Such convos also appear in Rushdie’s memoir, and have the bizarre effect of making us feel a distance from our subject and narrator when they appear in the latter half of the film. The reality of the situation is much more interesting, much more personal.

Rushdie himself did not know the full extent of his injuries for many weeks after, though we’re confronted with them throughout “Knife” — the long line of staples up his stomach, the severed nerves of his left hand, the massive gash along his throat, and of course his ruined eye — witnesses to this document, being forced to truly see what was done to this man in the name of God and religion and faith and conviction. The revulsion that we feel toward this attack is, of course, baked right into the film, but Gibney often dances away from making it feel like a symptom of something wider. (That “the A” was radicalized partially by YouTube videos is the sort of thing deserving of its own film.)

Both the back-and-forth structure of Gibney’s film and Rushdie’s own words eventually bring us around to the idea that it’s a chronicle of the many times Rushdie has had to remake himself (though we venture to say that recovering from the attack is a hell of a lot harder than reinventing himself by cameoing in “Bridget Jones’s Diary” in 2001, just as he was emerging from his exile). Each time, something new is found, but something else is certainly lost.

The circular nature of the film and Rushdie’s own life is further cemented in its final moments, as Rushdie and Griffiths return to the site of his attack more than a year after it occurred. That alone would be upsetting, but Rushdie, forever trying to understand the story of his own life, then walks his wife and her camera through all the moments before, during, and after the attack. Extended footage of the attack from all sorts of angles follows, much of it slowed down, horrifying, still hard to believe. At one point, the knife itself appears. At many others, we see Rushdie’s face and hands. He’s reaching, terrified, blood-soaked, but still alive. And you can’t look away.

Grade: B+

“Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie” premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.

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