DVD News: Available Right Now — The Best Thriller You Never Heard Of
It’s called Tell No One. It’s out on DVD and Blu-ray today. And it’s not to be missed. The film is based on a bestseller by Harlan Coben, the gifted mystery writer best known for a series of crime novels featuring sports agent turned investigator Myron Bolitar (Long Lost, just out today, is the ninth in the Bolitar series). Tell No One, a stand-alone Coben novel, was published in 2001 and involved a doctor who can’t get over the murder of his wife eight years after the fact. Channeling Hitchcock’s masterpiece Vertigo and the grief that twists the James Stewart character, Tell No One seemed a natural for Hollywood, what with its shocking twists, turns and reversals. But Hollywood dropped the ball, as usual. It took the French, in this case the young Gallic director Guillaume Canet, to see the potential in the material. The result on screen is a thriller that truly thrills. Don’t be scared off because Tell No One is in French with English subtitles. You won’t be able to resist the pull of the movie, which makes the trip from America to France without losing the riveting action and haunting romance that Coben instilled in the tale. The DVD offers the option of a version of the movie dubbed into English which is so bad it damn near kills the suspense. Skip it. Delete it from your consciousness. Pretend it’s not there. This movie is too good to screw with its nuances. Canet packs the film with the pleasures of the unexpected. Francois Cluzet is the film’s grieving heart as Alex, the pediatrician who is jolted by a video Web Site that seems to show his wife Margot (Marie-Jose Croze) among the living. An e-mail containing the link to the video contains a terse warning: “tell no one.” Trust me, you’ll be hooked. The acting is uniformly first-rate. Take special note of Kristin Scott Thomas as a lesbian married to Alex’s sister, Francois Berland as a sly cop, the director himself as a stud with dark secrets, and Jean Rochefort and Andre Dussollier as two fathers too devoted to their children. Tell No One, which looks vivid on Blu-ray, pays off in ways the current thriller, Duplicity, does not. Duplicity piles on tricks that lead to a limp climax. Tell No One races to an ending that will keep you up nights.