Whether or not those two remain trustworthy, the police brass have become convinced that Alex is a psycho serial killer, while suave, horsey billionaire Gilbert Neuville (Jean Rochefort) has his own reasons for suspecting that Margot isn't dead. As it is, he's a damaged loner whose only friends are his equestrian sister's lesbian lover (Kristin Scott Thomas) and a gun-slinging drug dealer named Bruno (Gilles Lellouche) whose hemophiliac son he has treated. But then whose corpse was identified by Margot's upstanding cop father (André Dussollier) at the crime scene? And who are the terrifying freelance goons who travel around town kidnapping, torturing and interrogating people - and framing Alex for their crimes?Īs the emails that may or may not be from Margot instruct Alex, he can tell no one and trust no one. Meanwhile, Alex is receiving unexplained emails, one of them containing a video that suggests, incredibly, that Margot is still alive. (I'm not disputing that this may be correct, only raising the idea that there are various ways to present it.) That universe seems to be collapsing on top of Paris pediatrician Alex Beck (François Cluzet) at two different points in the space-time continuum.Ī gruesome discovery has led the cops to reinvestigate the mysterious murder of Alex's wife and childhood sweetheart Margot (Marie-Josée Croze, of 'The Diving Bell and the Butterfly'), which happened eight years earlier at their lake house. Like most effective but not transcendent thrillers, the Frenchified 'Tell No One' ('Ne le dis à personne,' across the pond) uses its characters and setting as the scrim that barely conceals a deeply paranoid view of the universe, perceived as a zone of systematic Darwinian cruelty. Canet, a 35-year-old acting-writing-directing phenom, has transposed the book's upscale and downscale New York locations to Paris and environs, packed the cast with top-notch Gallic acting talent, and made a film that clicks along efficiently from one hair-raising discovery to the next (although at two hours-plus, it's both longer and denser than most Hollywood genre pictures these days). Adapted from a novel by best-selling American mystery writer Harlan Coben, Guillaume Canet's hit French thriller 'Tell No One' has a certain mid-Atlantic hardness about it, an undercurrent of profound psychological or spiritual disturbance that doesn't quite seem French but isn't exactly American either.

Tell no one novel