| Go with the flow
REVIEW
THE CRIMSON RIVERS
Starring Jean Reno, Vincent Cassel
Directed by Mathieu Kassovitz
Contemporary suspense thrillers have really fallen from grace – of these, the serial killer subgenre is the most revisited and the least effective. Since the financial success of David Fincher’s grisly opus Seven, filmmakers have sucked the life out of a once original vein. The Crimson Rivers is a mostly successful exception, able to dodge conventional scare tactics.
Director Mathieu Kassovitz (La Haine) has adapted Jean-Christophe Grangé’s novel of the same name that tells the story of a police commissioner (Jean Reno) who is called to the scene of a brutal homicide at a remote French university. As the investigation progresses, he begrudgingly teams with a younger detective (Vincent Cassel) to solve the case. Not content to play as a tension-fraught buddy picture, The Crimson Rivers sets itself apart from its American cousins from the very first frame. The film’s greatest strength is that it takes classic elements like perpetual rainfall and creepy subterranean settings and underplays them.
Reno and Cassel are both competent performers and suppress the melodrama inherent in the script, which is admirable because this is no typical whodunnit. What the script does not divulge about the identity of the killer, the editing does, so the audience has the enviable position of knowing considerably more than the characters. Abandoning "who" in favor of "why" makes for a far more interesting journey. This approach only seems new because most contemporary filmmakers do not have enough faith in their script or cast to attempt something like this.
Kassovitz has not crafted the perfect thriller – an out of place fight sequence almost derails the film, and though it gets back on track, by the last act The Crimson Rivers falls apart. Its worst crime is that in the 11th hour it becomes what it has tried to distance itself from. Those who have given themselves over to the film will forgive the stumble – those on the other side of the coin will wonder what happened to the dingy murder mystery they started watching. |
