Revolver Entertainment
François Cluzet in "Tell No One."
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. 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).
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. (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.