Tell No One

French actor-turned-director Guillaume Canet had a big hit in France with this widescreen, big-budget adaptation of US writer Harlan Coben’s best-selling thriller. As the film veers violently from housebound, bourgeois psychological thriller – with locations in Rambouillet and Lake Charmaine – to urban action adventure and back again, it certainly makes its main actor, François Cluzet, jump though all the acting hoops. As the widowed paediatrician whom the police supect of involvement in his wife’s savage murder eight years earlier, he does well to retain the composure and air of Hitchcockian ambivalence necessary to cast shadows of doubt in the audience’s mind. Cluzet certainly shows better heels and stamina than Tom Cruise as he sprints through the markets and motorways of suburban Paris trying to evade both the police and mystery assailants as he pursues his hunt for a mystery woman who may or may not be his dead wife. In the way these things go, the film’s very implausibilities – would tough, urban locals really help such a man? – aid its enjoyment. But the surfeit of plot twists and turns become progressively confusing and redundant. Compensation comes with some fruity cameos – notably from Kristin Scott Thomas’s lesbian helpmeet and Jean Rochefort’s supremely unhelpful local toff – presenting reassuring caricatures of the kind that used to grace and brighten ‘Inspector Morse’. It’s ably if not inspirationally directed and Christophe Offenstein’s fluid camera tracks the action well enough, but any pretence to subtlety or sophistication seems lost in translation.