TELL NO ONE is a tight and tautly plotted thriller in the classic mold. An innocent man is plunged from the mundane into mysterious with nothing less than his life on the line for reasons he can’t begin to imagine.
The man is Alexendre Beck (Francois Cluzet), a newly minted pediatrician celebrating with a family dinner that is just a little tenser than it should be. The subsumed emotions crop up the next day as he spends a romantic afternoon and evening with his beloved wife, Margot (Marie-Josee Croze), revisiting old haunts and taking a skinny-dip together. She chides him for being so cold to his sister over their father’s estate. He tells her to stay out of it, and as she swims back to shore, that fight and the look on her face become the last he will ever see of her. There is a strangled cry, a desperate attempt to get to her, and a blow to the head that lands him back in the water.
Eight years later, he’s got a scar on his nose and some messy emotional baggage. He visits his late wife’s parents each year on the anniversary of Margot’s death for an awkward wallow in their mutual grief, and buries himself in his work, much to the distress of his sister-in-law, Helene (Kristen Scott-Thomas), who frets about his inability to move on. This year, though, he receives a mysterious e-mail directing him to tell no one about it, and to access a link at the exact hour and day of Margot’s death. He does, and there, at an unknown subway station, is Margot herself, looking straight at the surveillance camera and mouthing something he can’t decipher. Another e-mail arrives with further instructions and the same admonition to tell no one.
Meanwhile, two bodies have been discovered near where Margot was murdered. One has a key in its pocket that shouldn’t be there, the other has a baseball bat with Alex’s blood on it. It’s enough to rouse the police to re-open their investigation into Margot’s death, with Alex once again on their suspect list. Despite someone else having been convicted, it was never explained how Alex got out of the water, nor who it was who called the police while he was supposedly unconscious.
Directed by co-screenwriter Guillaume Canet from a novel by Harlan Coban, it has an economy of style that is deceptively simple. Never muddled, and it always plays fair with the audience. There is one perfectly rendered clue that goes to the heart of the mystery that is both front-and-center on camera, but also presented with an off-handedness designed to delight those who pick up on it. The story is spun out with so many twists that, like the world Alex finds himself in, it becomes impossible to trust anything or anyone. The cast of characters is populated with vivid eccentrics who walk uncertain moral lines while adding layers of complexity to the procedings. Motives surface, and ultimately it’s up to Bruno (Gilles Lellouche), a shadowy black-marketeer who owes the good doctor a favor, to re-define integrity, and to an obsessive-compulsive cop (Francois Berleand) with a hankering to not take things at face value, to buck the system and come up with the truth.
There is the obligatory chase scene, but kept within the realm of the real-world, giving it a real sense of tension as Alex attempts to cross busy beltway traffic with only his determination and terror to help him and both the police and shadowy thugs with a license to torture and then kill on his trail. Cluzet, at the heart of the film and as the film’s heart, is compelling from start to finish. Dogged, yet restrained as the doctor who will let nothing deter him from discovering whose face it was that the computer link brought him, he plays the determination with the sort of calm that is more focused, more effective, and perhaps even more deadly than mere surface hysteria. The intensity he gives to his boyishly soft face, dark eyes suddenly alive again after years of mourning is palpable.
Eerie, heart-stopping, and surprisingly sentimental, TELL NO ONE has that most compelling and undeniable of motives: the passions that bring out the best and the worst in human beings. Blending the hard-boiled and the innocent with a sly dexterity, this is a riveting piece of filmmaking that never relies on the obvious or the cliché.
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