Tell No One 15, 131 mins

Tell No One is a French film based on a novel by the American thriller writer Harlan Coben. It’s surprising it’s taken a young French director to adapt this book into a gripping film of the kind Hollywood no longer manages. Guillaume Canet and his co-writer, Philippe Lefebvre, have moved the novel from New York to Paris and made a few changes to the ending, creating the perfect Eurothriller: a stylish, complex film, driven by character, that can appeal equally to the John Grisham crowd and the art-house audience.

The action begins with a paediatrician, Alex Beck (François Cluzet), and his attractive wife, Margot (Marie-Josée Croze), having dinner with Alex’s sister Anne (Marina Hands) and friends on the Becks’ family farm. It’s a lazy, loving affair. The next day, Alex and Margot go off to a beautiful wood where, as childhood sweethearts, they used to swim. At this point you know that people from the middle classes who have lovely dinner parties with attractive friends on beautiful farms in France must come to harm. The plot demands it, as does our envy. On the way back to the car, Margot is murdered and Alex is knocked unconscious.

The film moves forward eight years, and Alex is in that no man’s land between mourning and moving on, going through the motions of daily life. He has tried to endure the loss of his wife by closing down and cutting himself off from family and friends. As he will soon discover, when faced by troubles, no man can go it alone in life. When two bodies are found in the woods where Margot was murdered, the police come around asking questions. Then Alex gets a mysterious e-mail showing real-time footage of his wife, with the instruction “Tell no one”.

The test of a good thriller is: are you sitting in your seat, eager to solve the crime? Canet neatly plants a series of clues and mysteries that reel the viewer in, so that, like Alex, you need to find out what’s going on. Photos of Margot turn up, showing that, when she was alive, somebody had beaten her up. Was it nice-guy Alex? Then Margot’s best friend, Charlotte, is murdered, with a rifle that belonged to Alex’s father. Alex is now the chief suspect, and goes on the run from the cops and a group of killers.

I can’t help but wonder if Tell No One has managed to take the rather tired thriller genre and make it look so fresh simply by setting it in France. The combination of Paris, attractive women, handsome men and Kristin Scott Thomas as a très chic lesbian is bound to give any thriller an instant, spray-on classiness. Would the film be so appealing if it were set in New York? I doubt it.

You could argue that we’ve been here before – remember that other nice doctor who was wrongly accused of killing his wife and went on the run, by the name of Richard Kimble (Harrison Ford in The Fugitive)? But one reason Canet’s film works so well is that Alex, despite running from cops and criminals, remains an ordinary man; Kimble was a master of disguise, evasion and investigation. The ordinary man in Hollywood – especially if played by a star – has to find the heroic within himself. Alex, on the other hand, never does. He isn’t interested in being a hero, or an avenger, only in getting his wife back. This is really a touching love story told through the setting of a thriller.

Canet wisely keeps the focus on Alex, not the criminal underworld he gets sucked into. He manages some nice touches, such as making the criminal who tortures people a skinny woman and not some big male ape. But the film’s greatest strength is the performance of its lead.

Cluzet – who physically resembles a young Dustin Hoffman – is a well-known character actor in France, and this is his breakthrough performance. There’s not one moment during the film when he appears to be acting. He keeps Alex’s grief beneath the surface, as if his agony were just a dull ache. In his eyes, we see the occasional flicker of his personal hell.

It’s so rare to find in a thriller a character whose fate you could possibly care about – but Tell No One is such a powerful love story that, like Alex, you hope against all reason for a happy ending.

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