Keswick Film Festival

Synopsis

If you enjoy film noir, romantic attachments, Hitchcock, humour, or the thriller genre, you should find plenty to appreciate in this story of the seedy-but-appealing ex-con (Cassel) and the partially-deaf office girl (Devos) whose lip-reading ability becomes crucial as the plot thickens. She needs an assistant in the estate agency, and picking Paul changes her from dowdy dogsbody to a woman living on the edge of her nerves and emotions.
Audiard dispenses with glamour and slickness: his unflinching eye for the ways in which people are turned inside-out through thwarted desire and desperation presents us with an edgy, erotic and increasingly violent movie.