‘Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie’ Review: Alex Gibney’s Intimate Study of Physical and Spiritual Recovery

One of the smartest choices of Alex Gibney’s affecting new doc, Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie, is to withhold, almost to the end, footage of the shocking 2022 attack at an education institution in Chautauqua, New York, during which a 24-year-old assailant rushed the stage, stabbing the author of The Satanic Verses 15 times. By that point in this contemplative film, we have seen the vicious assault represented in animated line drawings and witnessed in distressing detail the awful aftermath, during which the gravely wounded Rushdie lay recovering in a Pennsylvania hospital.

But nothing can prepare us for the horrific chaos of the attempted murder, with audience members, security and medics mobbing the stage to halt the attack and urgently tend to the victim. Nor can this clear-headed account of the ordeal and the sheer human resilience required to survive it — physically, psychologically, spiritually — prepare us for the understated…