Passage à l’acte (1996)

Passage à l’acte is a French thriller film first released in 1996, directed by Francis Girod.  The film stars Daniel Auteuil, Patrick Timsit, Anne Parillaud, Michèle Laroque and Marianne Denicourt.  It has also been released under the title: Death In Therapy.  Our overall rating for this film is: good.


To clear his mounting debts, psychiatrist Antoine Rivière has to juggle his career as a writer with the need to take on as many patients as he can.  His latest subject, Edouard Berg, proves to be more of a mystery than most.  When Berg confesses to having murdered his wife, Antoine is at first dismissive, but then changes his mind when his ex-wife is threatened by a stranger. Certain that Berg is playing a dangerous game with him, Antoine starts to pick up the threads that will lead him to the truth…

Francis Girod directed this unusually cerebral thriller, a creepily dark film which explores the shortcomings and potential dangers of psychoanalysis.   There’s a splendidly introspective performance from Daniel Auteuil, but the film really belongs to his lesser known co-star, Patrick Timsit, who is appropriately chilling as the central villain of the piece.  Whilst the film manages to hold the spectator’s interest, the complexity of the narrative is a bit of a turn off, as is the fact that the plot becomes increasingly implausible as things progress.  The film may have worked better as a black comedy, along the lines of Grirod’s better known work Le Trio infernal (1974).  As a straight thriller, Passage à l’acte is not a bad example of its genre, but the direction feels heavy-handed in places and, on reflection, the story is more than a little contrived.


© James Travers 2005

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