Folle à Tuer

A fair thriller that begins with one of WC Fields' anti-kid quotes, and promisingly looks like despatching one averagely noxious brat quite early on, but settles instead for making his survival a condition of its heroine's redemption. Having just been released from a mental clinic and hired as a governess, Jobert finds herself at the centre of a kidnap-and-murder conspiracy hatched by her apparent benefactor, and involving a studiedly vicious Milian as its agent. On the run from both killer and media-fanned frame-up, she's perhaps just a little too much the bastion of resourceful sanity in a mad world, but Boisset conjures a pleasing momentum for her flight, and allows some of the absurd humour of her plight to seep blackly out. Based on the gloriously titled série noire novel O Dingos, O Châteaux by Jean-Patrick Manchette (Aggression, Nada), it leans surprisingly little on modish paranoia, and pleases most for its essential modesty.