Cortex (2008) - film review

When Charles Boyer, a retired police officer, begins to show signs of Alzheimer’s disease, he decides to put himself in the care of a specialist clinic.  At least he will no longer be a burden to his son Thomas, who has problems of his own.  Within a short time of Charles’s arrival at the clinic, several of his fellow inmates die, suddenly and apparently without reason.   Charles immediately suspects that someone in the clinic is killing the inmates and begins his own investigation.  Unfortunately, his memory has now deteriorated to the point where he can hardly tell what is real and what is imaginary.  Is it possible that he could be imagining the whole thing...?

Director Nicolas Boukhrief followed up his highly original and well-received modernist action thriller Le Convoyeur (2004) with this equally innovative and stylish suspense thriller set in possibly the bleakest of worlds.  With its cunning blurring of reality and imagination, its gallery of morally ambiguous characters and some inventive subjective camerawork, Cortex has a distinctly Hitchcockian feel to it.  There are also some dark aspects of social realism – offering a grim insight into the world of Alzheimer’s victims and their carers – which make watching it an unsettling and thought-provoking experience.
  
André Dussollier heads an impressive cast – which includes such talented actors as Aurore Clément, Marthe Keller, Pascal Elbé and Julien Boisselier, all excellent.  In one of his toughest role in years, Dussollier gives a superlative performance, which poignantly evokes the distress and anxiety of an Alzheimer sufferer struggling to hang on to reality, without drenching the plot with a surfeit of overplayed emotion.

As in Le Convoyeur, this film suffers from uneven pacing, although the biggest let down is the denouement, which is handled a little too predictably, lacking the surprise element which the sly, tortuous build up suggested might be in the offing.  Cortex may not be perfect, it may not be comfortable, but it is still a film that is well worth seeing, an entertaining, spine-chilling variation on that much-loved mainstay of French cinema, the polar.

© James Travers 2008

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