Scribe [La mécanique de l’ombre] **** (2016, François Cluzet, Denis Podalydès, Sami Bouajila ) – Movie Review

Co-writer/ director Thomas Kruithof’s really good and exciting French Seventies-style 2016 paranoia thriller is intensely acted, grippingly done and stylishly filmed.

François Cluzet stars as the depressed, alcoholic, recently unemployed Duval, who is contacted by phone call from an all-knowing, all-seeing mysterious intelligence organization, hiring him to transcribe intercepted calls, sitting all day alone in a spartan office room. He has got a small set of rules he must follow, or else. On pain of what? Death? Who is he dealing with? Well, we will find out.

A tense, eerie and compelling movie, done and dusted in a perfectly paced 91 minutes, it demands to be seen. Cluzet gives a brilliantly minimalist performance of a middle-aged everyman caught up in a Kafkaesque nightmare that really works. He doesn’t seem to do much, but he does everything. He is a bit like a Gallic Gene Hackman (though he looks more like Dustin Hoffman), and the movie, perhaps deliberately, recalls Hackman’s movie The Conversation (1974).

Kruithof is a minimalist worker too, or perhaps that should be miniaturist. He puts a lot in to his movie, by way of detail, atmosphere and character, and get a lot out of a little. The real test is, would Hitchcock have admired it. And the answer is, yes he would.

It all goes to show once again that the French are still best at thrillers. Maybe that should be the Belgians, as the film is a French-Belgian co-production, made in Brussels. So many films are being made now with Belgian tax money help. This one cost $5,200,000, which is a decent, generous-sized budget for a small film like this, no doubt helping it to look as smart as it does. It even has an exciting action-packed ending that leaves you satisfied.

Kruithof writes the screenplay with fellow scribe Yann Gozlan.

© Derek Winnert 2017 Movie Review

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