Tell No One a satisfying thriller
Eight years after his wife’s brutal murder pediatrician Alex Beck (François Cluzet) receives an e-mail linking to a video of the supposedly dead woman. Along with some other instructions it emphasizes that Beck “tell no one.” This is a tricky proposition given that new evidence has been uncovered in the nearly decade-old case casting suspicion clearly on Beck.
Fortunately Tell No One is not the boilerplate cyber-thriller this summary would indicate. Based on the novel by Harlan Coben though transposed from a gritty New York City setting to the more polished streets of Paris writer-director Guillaume Canet’s film is more a taut thriller than cautionary Internet tale — a safe bet as frenzied chases tend to be more interesting than frenzied mouse-clicks.
Canet’s screenplay gets a good deal of mileage out of dropping Beck into unfamiliar territory then seeing how he copes. Though the doctor does possess the Fugitive -style powers that innocent middle-class folks-done-wrong always seem to have in thrillers — the ability to outrun throngs of police officers and stay one step ahead of the cleverest detectives — it’s certainly not without effort. Cluzet is excellent in conveying Beck’s exasperation. Even when he’s calm on the surface there’s always the sense that his mind is elsewhere and when things get physical he seems to get by more on adrenaline than any pseudo-superpowers.
Things get a little sticky as the film keeps piling on twists and coincidences. At two hours the film feels padded — as if Canet wanted to include every disorienting turn of Coben’s novel without worrying whether he’d have time to wrap it all up. He does but only with the help of a great deal of exposition from all parties. The film’s conclusion revolves around a detailed minutes-long confession — it’s inelegant at best but when you’re trying to resolve a half-dozen dangling threads and eliminate any ambiguity it gets the job done.
Still it’d be a stretch to describe Canet’s direction as clunky. His staging of the film’s climactic chase is spot-on a delirious mix of exhausted stumbles and adrenaline-fuelled escapes. He also takes the time to enjoy the moments of serenity within Beck’s nightmare situation — the way his camera clings to a beautiful woman is particularly hypnotic.
If you can forgive its expository conclusion Tell No One is a perfectly satisfying thriller. A thriller that relies on carefully crafted tension rather than a constant string of explosions is always welcome even if it had to be transported overseas just to get made.
