Le Tueur (2008)

Le Tueur is a French thriller film first released in 2008, directed by Cédric Anger.  The film stars Gilbert Melki , Grégoire Colin, Mélanie Laurent, Sophie Cattani and Xavier Beauvois.  Our overall rating for this film is: very good.


Léo Zimmerman is a successful financier to whom life could not have been kinder, or so it would seem.  When a strange young man named Dimitri Kopas appears in his office one day he realises instantly that someone wants him dead.   Although Kopos presents himself as an investor, Léo guesses correctly that he is really a hired killer.  After an anxious few days during which he learns he is being stalked, Léo contacts Kopas and offers him a deal.  He asks the killer if he will allow him to live for just a few more days, to so that he can make provision for his eight-year-old daughter, who means more to him than anything.  How can Kopas refuse, particularly as it is Christmas...?

Cédric Anger, screenwriter and former critic on the Cahiers du cinéma, makes an impressive directing debut with this stylish thriller-drama, a slick variation on the classic French film noir polar with a bitter existentialist edge to it.  Anger’s previous screenwriting credits include such diverse works as Werner Schroeter’s Deux (2002) and Xavier Beauvois’ Le Petit lieutenant (2005), and here he scripts an intensely compelling drama revolving around a hitman and his intended victim.  

Although Le Tueur superficially resembles the familiar polar in its style and gangster trappings, it is an altogether different kind of film, driven not by the exigencies of plot but by the complexities of the two main characters, superbly played by Gilbert Melki and Grégoire Colin.  This is more a character study than a conventional thriller, one whose deeply unsettling mood contributes both dramatic tension and a bleak lyricism.   The film’s haunting sense of melancholia is at its most potent in the sequences where dialogue is absent and we enter the minds of the two protagonists by their subtle gestures and their interaction with the world around them.

Initially, the two main characters appear to be polar opposites, one nervous and inoffensive, the other cold and deadly.  But as their true natures become apparent, we soon realise that first impressions can be very deceptive.  Neither character is as straightforward as he appears, and so the drama that ensues is far from predictable.  The film noir notion that villains and heroes have, ultimately, little to distinguish them is what underpins this strange and beguiling film.   Life’s victims are never easy to spot, as the film’s viciously ironic ending makes clear.  Elegantly composed with a disturbing quietude, Le Tueur offers a haunting excursion into the darker passages of the human soul.

© James Travers 2010

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