Les Eaux dormantes (1992) - film review

Denis de Lespinière returns to his home in Brittany after having spent three years working for Médecins sans frontières in Cambodia.  Soon after his arrival in France, he receives an anonymous letter telling him that his father has mysteriously disappeared.  When he arrives at his family home, Denis encounters a wall of silence and deceit.  He decides to carry out his own investigation into his father’s disappearance...

This film is based on a novel by the legendary French suspense thriller writing team Boileau and Narcejac, whose works have provided material for some of the best suspense films of all time, including Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques.  Sadly, Les Eaux dormantes occupies a place at the opposite end of the spectrum, marred by ill-conceived direction, unconvincing acting and excessively laboured cinematography.

The film begins well enough, setting up the mystery and introducing a bizarre set of characters.  Unfortunately, neither the plot nor the characters develop sufficiently to maintain the audience’s attention, and the overly-contrived suspense becomes tedious and actually slows the film down to an unbearable crawl.

Presumably to add depth to the shallow characterisation, the film then starts to bombard us with flashbacks, some of which have nothing to do with the narrative.  By the time the mystery is resolved at the very end of the film, you really just don’t care and you have very little sympathy for Lespinière and his weird family.

The moral of this film is that not everyone can make a great suspense thriller.  Jacques Tréfouel’s attempt is clearly well intended but it is just too superficial and deliberate to be taken seriously.

© James Travers 2002

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