Film

Actor-turned-filmmaker Guillaume Canet relocates Harlan Coben’s best-selling thriller from the U.S. to France and deploys a first-rate cast on its outlandish twists and turns, with remarkably entertaining results. It’s still the movie equivalent of a beach book, but it’s the beach book you can’t put down until you know how it all turns out.

Eight years ago, pediatrician Alex (Cluzet) and his beloved wife, Margot (Croze), were enjoying a moonlit idyll in the woods when they became the victims of a brutal crime. Alex was beaten and left for dead; Margot was kidnapped and murdered. Alex has been sleepwalking ever since, dutifully going through the motions of life and work. Then the past comes roaring back: Two long-buried corpses are unearthed near the scene of the crime. Alex and the police reexamine the events of that awful night and conclude that the facts never quite added up; Alex doesn’t know what to make of the disturbing new evidence but the police do—they always suspected he killed Margot.

Streamlined by Canet and cowriter Philippe Lefebvre, Coben’s convoluted wrong-man tale gets a shot in the arm from its stellar supporting cast, including Nathalie Baye and Jean Rochefort. They can’t turn pulp into gold, but they do make it glitter.