Thrillers are described as Hitchcockian with wild abandon but the term is applied to this 2000 French thriller with only slight abandon: there's something wrong (some trouble) with the main character, Harry, a variety of Psycho whose waddle and gaze, at once twinkly and steely, recalls Robert Walker's deranged Bruno Antony and like Antony, this Harry has an off-kilter plan — but the real trouble with Harry, who turns up and wreaks havoc in his old school chum Michel's life, is there is no clear motivation for his actions - Hitchcock wouldn't have simply called him a psycho without also injecting the character with a mother or psychoanalysis or an inflated sense of superiority — and even Patricia Highsmith, whose works this thriller with its two males in stand-off very closely resembles, kept things cracking, not dour like this, and imbued her wafer-thin characters with clear motivations, ensuring her psychopath-driven plots were more than just shell...
★★☆☆☆
CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW
