When Tom an American College Professor and one-time author arrives in Paris he tells the Immigration Officer he is there to visit his wife and child.  What he doesn’t reveal is that she has a Court Restraining Order out and refuses to let him see their daughter. When Tom stalks the girl the police are called and he runs away in and hides out in the nearest bar.  Some hours later after drinking his worries away he ends up waking up on a bus minus all his luggage and wallet.

Stuck in a very run down part of town, he persuades a very sketchy bar owner to rent him a room on the basis that he will somehow pay him for it later. Totally broke he accepts a very odd job from the man where all he has to do is sit in a locked room buzzing in a flow of mysterious men.

Meanwhile when he is back hanging about in the city center he is recognised by an ex-pat bookseller from the photo on the cover of his one published novel, and gets invited to a literary gathering where he is instantly picked up by Margit a very glamorous widow of a Hungarian novelist.  She phones him the next day and invites him over to her grand apartment in the 5th Arrondissement. She clearly has one thing in mind, and it isn’t about having a cup of tea. 

There are other hints as to the fact that things may not really be as they seem in this story with the presence of an aggressive Black man who lives in the room next door to Tom and leaves their shared bathroom in disgusting state, and than physically threatens him when he dares to complain. There is also the young Polish waitress in the Bar who Tom starts sleeping with, before he realises that she is in fact the girlfriend of the owner who is not to hesitant about becoming violent when need be.  But nothing really starts to add up in this psychological thriller until someone gets murdered.

This puzzling mystery based on the best selling novel by Douglas Kennedy is the work of writer/director Pawel Pawlikowski and only surfaced on my ‘watchlist’ after recently seeing his superb new movie ‘Ida’ which intrigued me sufficently to want to see his other work.  With this movie which he made in 2011, Pawlikowski shows us exactly what we (think we) want to see whilst leaving it all open to our own interpretation.  And he really succeeds so well in this thanks mainly to the fact that troubled Tom is played so sublimely by Ethan Hawkes who is so at home with such an enigmatic role like this.  Hawkes chooses his parts so carefully that his presence in any movie immediately validates it for me (next up Richard Linklater’s ‘Boyhood’).  It also didn’t actually hurt that the seductress was played by my favorite femme fatale Kristin Scott Thomas.

At times the blurring of all the lines gets very confusing and it is definitely one of those movies that remain with you days later when you are still trying to think what really happened.  Very intriguing and totally engaging. 

★★★★★★★★