Tell No One 6.5 (Ne le dis personne)

Before it sank under the weight of its implausibilities, I was hoping that this French psycho-thriller would, Cache-like, leave its mystery unsolved and leave us drifting in a world of unknowable terror. Instead, it went the Fugitive route and had its pediatrician hero, Alex, outrunning and outwitting the entire Paris police force and, worse, gave us a five-minute confession by a heretofore minor character explaining all the mysteries, largely by introducing two people who hadn’t before appeared on-screen! Except even this didn’t explain everything, which made me guess the movie was based on a book, where everything had more time to be laid out. Whenever a movie plot leaves out key facts, or throws in facts that just don’t fit, it is usually because the screenplay is based on a book or, even worse, “a true story.” When screenwriters are left to their own devices, they have better odds of crafting something plausible. As The New Yorker and my daughter both said, it’s a good thing this movie was in French, where the language was pretty and all the people were stylish. But plot trumps patina, and this plot was a dud.