While Dominik Moll's previous film HARRY, HE'S HERE TO HELP (US title: WITH A FRIEND LIKE HARRY) has been called Hitchcockian, I think his follow-up is more Lynchian. Alain and Benedicte (HARRY's Laurent Lucas and Jane Birkin's daughter Charlotte Gainsbourg) are the model couple. He works for a home automation company and she is a stay at home wife. One night before dinner with the Alain's boss, Benedicte finds that the sink has stopped up. The boss (UN COEUR EN HIVER's Andre Dussolier) and his wife Alice (Charlotte Rampling who has been redefining her career in French films such as this and Ozon's masterpiece UNDER THE SAND and the lesser SWIMMING POOL) arrive and what follows is a tense dinner in which Alice throws a drink in her cheating husband's face and ridicules the younger couple's aloof manners and picture-perfect marriage. Later that night, Alain unscrews the pipes under the sink and finds a half-drowned rodent as the source of the clog. The next day, Benedicte takes it to the vet the next day and discovers that its a lemming - a Scandanavian rodent not found in France whose supposed penchant for suicide is merely a romantic notion. Alain works late and encounters Alice who tells him her husband tried to kill her once and that the only reason she stays with him is because she wants "to see him croak." Alice comes onto Alain but he rebuffs her (eventually). Alice shows up at their home the next day while Alain is at work. She apologizes to Benedicte for her behavior at dinner but then tells her that she tried to seduce Alain. She then tells Benedicte that she's tired and need to lie down. Benedicte leads her to the spare room and waits for her husband to come home.

To tell you any more beyond this point would really be spoiling things. Masquerading under the guise of a genteel psychological thriller a la Claude Chabrol, LEMMING takes a darker turn with a variation on a theme from VERTIGO by way of David Lynch. The film even looks like a David Lynch film with its physical and internal darkness lurking within rather mundane settings and an ending coda that brings to mind BLUE VELVET (come to think of it, even the appearance of the lemming itself perhaps recalls the worms beneath the grass in the Lynch film's opening). After supporting straight-man turns in Bertrand Bonello's boring THE PORNOGRAPHER, Leos Carax's pretentious POLA X, and Marina De Van's intriguing IN MY SKIN, Lucas is great in a lead role that requires a lot of passivity and puzzlement (he seems to have become a French thriller favorite with lead and co-star roles in films like Moll's previous film HARRY, LEMMING scripter Gilles Marchand's WHO KILLED BAMBI?, Fabrice du Welz's CALVAIRE, one of two stars playing a dual role in Bonello's TIRESIA). Rampling is great with her deathmask countenance and cold demeanor. Gainsbourg manages to look both like her mother as well as a younger version of Rampling. Dussolier is also convincing as a generally likable guy capable of great insensitivity. Here, there's no question of a supernatural influence and I only found myself a little disappointed that the ultimate purpose of these happenings was not more ambiguous.

The R1 DVD from Strand is a PAL-NTSC conversion with some distracting ghosting that's less noticeable on a regular television. At 1.85:1, its at least anamorphic (unlike their disc of the LEMMING scripter Gilles Marchand's WHO KILLED BAMBI which was in 4x3 2.35:1) and the subtitles are burned in (which makes me wonder if Strand simply recorded the UK disc to a DVD recorder in NTSC mode rather than having to force the subtitles for some rights issue) and the audio is 2.0 stereo even though the film was mixed in both Dolby Digital and DTS (and foreign releases are in 5.1). The only extras are trailers. The UK disc has interviews and behind the scenes footage.

For the film itself, the R1 disc is worth a Netflix rental but if you like this one enough to purchase it then go for the UK import (the 2-disc French and German releases do not have English subtitles).

I was completely unimpressed WITH A FRIEND LIKE HARRY, but this one's a winner. I think it's one of the best thrillers in recent years. Great performances, and a palpable sense of creeping dread that seeps right into you. It's rare when a modern thriller takes you down a twisty path that simultaneously feels unfamiliar and exhilarating, & this one does just that. Highly recommended!

I thought this was a definite step up from With a Friend Like Harry (which was really pretty decent) and Who Killed Bambi (which kinda wasn't). But it relied on some pretty silly stuff (like the flying webcam), which I don't think was meant to play so goofy; and asked us to believe that the lead characters had never heard of lemmings or knew what they were famous for (I'm not usually a big believer in test audiences... but if I could've been in the theatre to yell, "Oh, come ON!" when the lead actress repeats "suicide?" to the vet with that blank look on her face, I believe I could have saved the filmmakers some embarrassment).
But, yeah... his films seem to be moving in the right direction. So, maybe if he keeps this up, a little further down the road he'll be making some really powerful flicks. B)

I've been trying to get a bunch of people together to go see this.

I thought HARRY, HE'S HERE TO HELP YOU was an excellent film and Sergi López's portrayal of the psychopathic Harry brilliant. I'm sure del Toro saw this film before casting him in PAN'S LABYRINTH.

Anyways Eric, thanks for the heads-up on LEMMING, I've moved it to the top of my Netflix Queue.

:lol:

Here is my review with screencaps for the Strand disc.

I, too, wondered about that. As far as I know, we've have no lemmings in the States but I've heard of them and their supposed inclination towards suicide (though I can't speak for Americans in general).