13 Movie Review:


One of the most unnerving and harrowing thrillers in recent memory, this low-budget French film is an extremely promising debut for Georgian filmmaker Gela Babluani.

Sebastien (George Babluani) is a 20-year-old workman who loses his job, and his paycheque, when his boss (Passon) is found dead in the bath. But Sebastien overheard his money-making scheme, so he intercepts a letter and follows the instructions, which take him to a secret countryside home outside Paris, where he discovers far too late that he's now part of an illicit game that wagers on human life. And his odds of surviving get worse with each round of play.

Filmed in the style of a classic Soviet-era drama, the writer-director uses stark black and white photography and minimal music and dialog to tell his story in the faces of the characters. The tension builds slowly, dropping hints and suspicions in the increasingly shady people Sebastien encounters on his odyssey. There's a constant sense of gritty realism; it never drifts into overwrought action, and the result is both gripping and horrifying.

Side characters add all kinds of texture, especially Sebastien's competitors--from the hard-nosed Recoing, working for his mercurial brother (Vandevelde), to the terrified Viliers. And Bongard's frazzled emcee is thoroughly unsettling. The men that swirl around them seem cold-hearted or sadistic by comparison, which is seriously disconcerting to both the players and to us. The more we see of this shadowy world, the harder it is to watch.

At the centre is a superb performance from George Babluani (the director's brother on and off screen). We can see his innocence draining out of him as he falls deeper into this terrifying situation, developing steely callousness around what's left of his humanity. As the story progresses, we are forced along with him to examine issues of mortality from gut-wrenching new angles. In some ways it's difficult to imagine a film more intensely frightening than this, simply because it travels so deeply under the skin to rattle our nerves right through the hellish climax and into two final scenes that tie it up in unexpected, gruelling, ironic ways.



Rich Cline

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