Tweet

Emma Paterson finds much to thrill her in this new film starring Vincent Lindon and Diane Kruger.

Ninety minutes fly by in this pulse-quickening feature debut from photographer-turned-director, Fred Cavayé. Maximising the expository services of the flashback, the film follows Lisa (Diane Kruger) and Julien (Vincent Lindon), whose middle-class domestic idyll is shattered when Lisa is falsely convicted of murder and sent to prison to serve a twenty-year sentence. After an abortive attempt to have the case re-opened, Julien seeks out the guidance of a former jail-breaking savant and resolves to break his wife out of confinement.

In a clever counter-intuitive gesture against the film’s title, the real focus here is Julien, whose mental chaos and desperate vigilantism unfold with absolute plausibility. From his early gauche encounters with a subterranean crime world, to a level of surveillance expertise worthy of competition with Gene Hackman in Coppola’s The Conversation, our engagement with his determination never falters and it is his journey by which we are ultimately moved.

Appropriately muted hues and crisp cinematography signal Cavayé’s photography background, and afford this taut thriller a visual sleekness that gives it just invitation to the upper echelons of the surveillance thriller genre.

 

Emma Paterson on 1st September 2009
View all 8 of Emma Paterson's reviews