Tell No One: Grade C

C
Tell No One (2006)
François Cluzet, Marie-Josée Croze ;Co-writer and director Guillaume Canet. (French, subtitled).

The first half of the movie is a good mystery/thriller. (A mystery is where the crime has occurred and the only question is whodunit. In a thriller, you don’t even know what is going on until later.) A pediatrician (Cluzet) and his wife (Croze) are at their summer cabin when she is kidnapped. (There is a rash of recent movies where the husband is on a swimming dock while the wife is on shore when something bad happens. Who voted for that device ?). Eight years later, the Dr. receives mysterious emails and a video clip that appear to be from his wife. Could she still be alive? He begins to investigate the history of the incident and as he does, clues slowly dribble out to us, but then the police get interested and he is the prime suspect in his wife’s demise. They don’t believe she is alive because the body was identified by the father. But then the movie goes south. The Dr. flees the police, his path hidden by a layer of red herrings. Also, many of the women looked similar and were hard to discriminate. The story became so arbitrary that the nominal surprise ending was anticlimactic. Good acting, poor screenplay.