The French Collection Vol 2: Thrillers (DVD) Artificial Eye

A collection of three of the best French thrillers of recent years.

‘Hidden’ (2005) is a slow-burning mystery that raises some ghosts of France’s recent past from writer-director Michael Haneke. Georges (Daniel Auteuil) is a successful TV presenter, married to Anne (Juliette Binoche). Their idyllic, middle-class life is suddenly derailed when Georges starts receiving tapes through the post, from someone who has been secretly filming him and his family as they get about their daily business. Gradually the tapes become more intimate and more personal, suggesting that the perpetrator is someone who knows Georges well. With the police unable to help, Georges and Anne find their comfortable existence gradually unravelling into paranoia and mistrust.

‘The Beat That My Heart Skipped’ (2005) is a superior remake of the American film, ‘Fingers’ (1978). Romain Duris takes the part (that Harvey Keitel played in the original) of Tom, an aspiring musician playing seedy bars in the backstreets of Paris. Torn between his music and the example of his sleazy father’s life of crime, Tom seems set to follow in his footsteps. But when he meets by chance a friend of his concert pianist mother’s, Tom’s musical ambitions are awoken and he strives to make a better life for himself. Can he escape his dark past and the shadow of his father.

In ‘Lemming’ (2005), lain (Laurent Lucas) seems to have everything – a good job, a beautiful wife (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and a perfect home. But when he discovers the corpse of a rodent in his kitchen sink, and when he falls for his boss’s cold wife (Charlotte Rampling), his life takes an unnerving and strange turn for the worse, as a series of events unfold that leave him questioning his own sanity.