15, 125mins

The French have always had a taste for hard-boiled American-style crime movies. With his second feature film, Tell No One, an adaptation of a novel by the American crime writer Harlan Coben, the actor-turned-director Guillaume Canet follows in the formidable footsteps of the likes of Jean-Pierre Melville, François Truffaut, Jacques Becker and Jean-Luc Godard.

Canet appears to be supremely confident in such illustrious company. He directs with a muscular swagger that occasionally borders on arrogance – not always a damaging trait in a director. He’s very gifted when it comes to lean action sequences – there’s a daring man-on-the-run segment in which our hero yo-yos across an eight-lane motorway, darts through a street market and ends up sheltering in a bin with a curious rat that leaves you breathless.

However Canet is not so competent when it comes to providing the film with an emotional core – and considering that it is almost as much a love story as a thriller, this undermines the rest of the movie.

We meet Alex Beck, a doctor (François Cluzet), and his wife Margot (Marie-Josée Croze) as the pair share a ritual – by a private lake, they tally the years of their relationship by carving notches into a tree.

But when we next meet Alex, he’s stoically tending his patients but the light went out of his life along with his wife eight years ago. Canet resorts to a horrible musical montage that juxtaposes scenes of the couple’s marriage with clips from her funeral.

Two events change the status quo of Beck’s solitary grief: two corpses are unearthed next to the lake where Margot was abducted; and an e-mail arrives that suggests she might be alive.

Cluzet is a good choice for Beck. Rather than a movie star, he looks like a provincial doctor who inadvertently wandered into a thriller. The 15-year age gap between him and Croze shows, however, and since they are meant to have grown up together, it jars a little. However the supporting cast, including Kristin Scott Thomas and Nathalie Baye, are strong. It’s a watchable thriller.

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010