‘Tell No One’ | 3 stars
By ROBERT W. BUTLER
The Kansas City Star
If you’ve ever wondered how Alfred Hitchcock might have adapted to the age of the Internet, look no further.
“Tell No One” (opening today at the Tivoli and Glenwood) is a French thriller that teases the intellect, shocks the senses and is sometimes simply too suspenseful for comfort.
In the style of classic Hitchcock films “The Lady Vanishes” or “The Man Who Knew Too Much” it establishes a seemingly unsolvable mystery and somehow explains it all away by the time the lights come up. Like “Saboteur” or “North by Northwest” it accuses an innocent man of murder and sends him outracing the law.
In a prologue filled with foreboding, physician Alex Beck (Francois Cluzet) and his wife, Margot (Marie-Josée Croze), go skinny-dipping in a lake near his boyhood home. Night falls and she swims to shore, leaving him floating on a raft. He hears her scream, races to help and as he climbs the dock is knocked unconscious by an unseen assailant.
Shortly thereafter Margot’s battered body is discovered in the woods. For a time suspicion falls on Alex. The case remains unsolved.
Eight lonely years pass.
Then one day Alex gets an anonymous e-mail telling him to visit a certain Web site at a specific time. He finds himself watching a live feed from a security camera outside a subway station. There, staring up at the camera, is a woman who could be Margot. She turns and descends into the station.
This rocks Alex’s world. With the help of his sister’s friend (Kristin Scott Thomas, speaking French as if born to it), the doctor begins restudying the case. The discovery of two bodies buried near the original crime scene once again throws suspicion on Alex. And when one of Margot’s best friends is found murdered along with evidence incriminating Alex, he takes off running, a dogged police detective in pursuit.
Besides the cops the fugitive Alex must outthink a crew of professional eavesdroppers and thugs, including a woman who uses her bare hands to inflict unbearable pain on her victims. He survives only with the help of a drug dealer (Gilles Lellouche), whose hemophiliac son Alex has saved on a couple of occasions.
Among the supporting players are Jean Rochefort as a powerful and vengeful politician and Nathalie Baye as Alex’s no-nonsense attorney.
Writer/director Guillaume Canet (he helmed “Joyeux Noel”) adapted the American novel by Harlan Coben. He has to work overtime to pull all the story’s threads together in a coherent fashion. It’s not a perfect fit — some of the plot’s coincidences stretch credulity.
But the breathless pacing and palpable tension he delivers, along with the strong performances by a cast of astounding depth, is more than enough to hook an audience and reel us in.
At a time when American filmmakers are churning out “thrillers” that don’t (“88 Minutes,” “Vantage Point,” “Street Kings”), we have in a month’s time seen two superior French examples of the genre, first “Roman de Gare” and now “Tell No One.”
Go figure.
‘TELL NO ONE’ ★★★
Director: Guillaume Canet
Cast: François Cluzet, Marie-Josée Croze, Kristin Scott Thomas, Nathalie Baye, Jean Rochefort
No MPAA rating; contains violence, nudity and sexual content; French with subtitles
Running time: 2:05
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