Vanishing Act

A woman's disappearance drives Guillaume Canet's edge-of-your-seat thriller.

by Sam Adams

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Published: Jul 10, 2008

IF LAKES COULD KILL: Hubbie by her side, Margot (Marie-Josée Croze) takes her last swim. Or does she? (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

The loving bond between Alexandre Beck (François Cluzet) and his wife, Margot (Marie-Josée Croze), is so perfect it can't possibly last. In the opening scenes of Guillaume Canet's thriller, Tell No One, the couple enjoy dinner with friends at their country house, drive to a lake, and lie naked on a dock bobbing in the water. They've been sweethearts since childhood, and their entire lives have led up to this.

Then, within seconds, it is over. They quarrel, over the disposition of his late father's farm. She swims abruptly for shore, leaving him behind. And then he hears a scream. He follows as quickly as he can, but the instant he reaches shore, he is clubbed by an unseen assailant, knocked unconscious back into the drink.

 

Eight years later, long after the day his wife's battered corpse was found, the guilt of that night still hangs over Alex. So when, just shy of the anniversary of the tragedy, he begins receiving e-mails suggesting she may still be alive, the emotions come flooding back, along with a welter of questions.

From the point where the corpses of two unidentified men are found in the woods not far the scene of the original crime, Tell No One explodes into a tangle of crisscrossing plots involving menacing free agents and nefarious, unseen powers, revealing what seemed to be a domestic tragedy as the tip of a vast and complex conspiracy.

Adapted from an American crime novel by Harlen Coben, Canet's movie loses force in direct proportion to the escalation of its plot. When it's powered by nothing more than the anger and loss in Cluzet's dark eyes and coiled frame, it's gripping, instilling the same pit-of-the-stomach tension as The Vanishing. It's almost a relief when the story expands to include a malignant show-jumping magnate and a female torturer — the departure from reality gives you just enough room to breathe.

Canet brings formidable skills to bear on his second feature. His camerawork is fluid, the editing precise. Canet and Philippe Lefebvre's script hasn't entirely shed its literary origins; it coheres on a thematic level, centered around the notion of overprotective parenting, but struggles to bring the complexity of its visuals in line with its writing. But the movie grabs so hard at the outset that it can afford to loosen its grip later on. Even after it slackens, it still leaves a mark.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

Tell No One | Directed by Guillaume Canet | A Music Box Films release  

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