Charlotte Gainsbourg in The Intruder (1999)

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Review

Not sure exactly how to describe this - a noir mystery with preternatural overtones, maybe? Here's the deal. Nick's second wife killed his first wife. She even confessed to it. But the first wife died two years before the second wife moved to town, and was killed with a weapon that wasn't invented until a year after she died. Say what? To make it more confusing, the first wife's diary is still being updated. And she has an identical twin, and ....

They added to the sense of mystery by having all the characters act really slippery and evasive and refuse to give any information to the second wife about her husband, themselves, or anything else. And I guess she hadn't seen enough noir thrillers to know that you're supposed to pull out a c-note, flash it on the bar, and say "maybe THIS will refresh your memory". Or maybe she tried that, and a c-note just doesn't buy what it used to buy in the thirties for Bogart. Especially when it's in Canadian money.

As for me, I didn't think it was too bad, but I really get kinda upset when I'm trying to figure out a mystery and the solution turns out to be any of the following:

• Divine intervention
  
• Supernatural occurrences
  
• A murderer who has never been introduced, or who was seen only briefly and insignificantly.

You know the drill. You're hanging out, trying to figure out why the jackhammer was there at the crime scene, and it turns out that it was left by Our Lady of Lourdes who appeared to the victim. Or it was deposited by a time-traveler, or it was all the guy in the window in the corner in scene one. Oh, poppycock!

The premise would have made a pretty good episode of The Outer Limits, but I don't know why they thought it would attract any attention in the theaters. It never found wide distribution. This movie, filmed in picturesque Quebec in January-February of 1999, was shopped at the Toronto Film Festival last fall, but ended up with only a few sporadic and half-hearted attempts at a theater run. It's now available on DVD.

It is acted by a decent, if uninspired, international cast, featuring Nastassja Kinski, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and Molly Parker. (Although some of the minor roles, policemen and lawyers, were obviously performed by somebody's cousins and brothers-in-law.) Gainsbourg got her skinny body naked, as she often does.

Written by: Scoopy...Scoopy.net