The term psychological thriller is usually used when a protagonist’s state of mind is key to a life-or-death plot. But in director Rebecca Zlotowski’s murder mystery the term is doubly applicable because the mind in question belongs to Lilian Steiner, an American, Jewish (we presume) psychiatrist living in Paris.
Intriguingly played by Jodie Foster (whose fluent French is well known though only rarely seen on film), Steiner’s life might be described as one of cool rationalism.
Patients arrive at her chic Paris apartment. As they pour their hearts out to the doctor who sits just out of sight of the patients on her couch, the sense builds that Steiner has become a jaded listener. Not much moves or excites her and the human traffic that enters and leaves her home only accentuates her solitude.
The message that one of her patients has committed suicide changes everything. She is still stunned when she turns up to the shivah and becomes disorientated when the widower attacks her. He believes his wife used Steiner’s prescription to kill herself. However Steiner cannot believe that a patient she has been seeing for nine years and who has never shown any suicidal tendencies would end her own life. There must be another reason. And that other reason must be murder.
Anne Berest’s screenplay, to which Zlotowski added the American in Paris element, is peppered with Jewish references. When Steiner accidentally dislodges a cloth covering a mirror at the shivah, she is warned that she will release a dybbuk. The plot thereafter veers down unexpected, sometimes mystical avenues. The dialogue is clever too.
“Don’t confuse scepticism with intelligence,” a hypnotist advises Steiner. The sheer intelligence of the sentence undermines Steiner’s contempt for the therapist’s methods, which Foster so subtly conveys with little more than deadpan silence.
By entertaining contrast, her former husband Gabriel, played by Daniel Auteuil, is gloriously gallic. Steiner’s uncertainty forces her into his reassuring company. He is the diametric opposite to the aloof intelligence of his former wife.
Zlotowski, meanwhile, generates an incredible amount of tension from events the meaning of which is often far from clear. There is a scene in a car where Steiner and her supportive ex share a cigarette while talking about how the marriage went wrong. It is a scene the director expertly infuses with the expectation of a violent interruption.
Equally, the “dream” sequence where Steiner finds herself in a past life that explains why she can’t stop crying – so superbly depicted by Foster as tears stream from those deadpan eyes – could so easily have felt indulgent. Yet because the film is anchored by Steiner’s rationalism, you go with it. More than that, you’re swept up by it.
Certificate 15
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