PREMIERE'S REVIEW (posted 6/25/08)

Tell No One, a French adaptation of the American novel by Harlan Coben, offers the kind of setup ripe for a satisfying thriller: pediatrician Alexandre Beck (François Cluzet) and his wife Margot (Marie-Josée Croze) are visiting Alex's sister in the country, and one evening they go for a swim at the isolated nearby lake where they used to play as children — and where, tonight, Margot is ambushed and (seemingly) killed, and Alex is knocked out. From there, the movie fast-forwards eight years: we see Alex in his white doctor's coat in his Paris office, looking slightly vacant; he's moved forward but hasn't moved on. Two things happen to re-energize him: a couple of bodies found by the lake prompt the police to reopen Margot's case, with Alex as the prime suspect, and Alex receives a mysterious email that leads him to believe his wife might still be alive. He can't tell the police, because a second email cryptically instructs him, "Tell no one. They're watching."

When a thriller suggests, of course, that a dead character might be alive, the question isn't if but why, and to what lengths her suffering husband will have to go to find her. On the second count, Tell No One is engaging in a tension-mounting, tightly wound kind of way. Alex is being attacked from two sides — the police who are trying to nail him and a team of baddies who are also hell-bent on finding Margot — and every clue he finds, from a cache of photographs of Margot, badly beaten, to a gun planted in his apartment, deepens the mystery. Cluzet, a remarkably expressive actor who won a César for his work here, effortlessly embodies Alex's desperate determination in every small action, whether he's walking from the car to the door or widening his eyes, and he manages to bring high emotion to even the fast-paced chase scenes; in one, he's running so hard that he actually falls and skids on the pavement. Writer-director Guillaume Canet, who also earned this film a César for Best Director, is himself an established French actor — this is his second feature as a director, after 2002's My Idol — and he clearly knows what constitutes a good performance. The cast here is uniformly superb, especially Kristin Scott Thomas as Alex's tough, lively best friend Hélène, who balances his quiet moroseness, and Nathalie Baye as his brisk, no-nonsense attorney.

It's a shame, then, that as the film nears the finish of its overlong 125-minute run time, it too stumbles hard, and the why of Margot's faked death turns out to be somehow both banal and farfetched. It's difficult to enjoy a thriller in which the big reveal is such a clunker, but if there's an exception to that rule, Tell No One might be it.

— Priya Jain