Tell No One

Dr. Alexandre Beck is once again under investigation of his wife's murder. The gendarmerie finds two bodies at the scene of Margot's disappearance, whose times of death coincide with the incident. The serial killer who the murder was eventually attributed to never confessed, an oddity considering he confessed to six others, adding to the mystery. One day, Beck receives an email with a link to a surveillance camera at a train station, and he sees his wife on it. Hope is restored, for perhaps his wife has actually been alive these eight years. Unfortunately, he is not the only one that has caught wind of her possible status among the living, and the other party involved would like to change that. It becomes a race to find Margot, only Beck does not know that she is once again in danger. At the same time, the police are closing in on Beck, as he is once again the prime suspect, after images surface of Margot bruised and battered and evidence at the two new crime scenes links to him. A chase scene follows, involving bodily torture, excessive gunshots and a car pileup on the beltway. He even sees Margot in the park, but the meeting is compromised when Margot’s pursuers reveal themselves by stopping the wrong girl. The movie ends finally with a big confession, where Margot’s father, Jacques, reveals his role in hiding Margot away, the death of Beck’s father and finally the murder of Phillippe, who had beaten Margot and raped members of his father’s equestrian team. But the confession itself is not true, for Jacques tampers with the wire before telling Beck the final truth: that Margot killed Phillippe. There is a happy ending, with Margot and Beck reuniting at the tree in the forest with their initials carved into it, and it looks as though Margot has filled in the 8 missing years.

I thoroughly enjoyed this movie. I liked it better than any of the hitchcock movies we have watched. The fast pace of the movie makes it more suspenseful than the long drawn out plot lines typical of Hitchcocks "thrillers". Canet thrilled me more with an intricate web of lies and a race to find the girl. With the skeleton in the basement and the final climb up the tower in Hitchcock's thrillers, I could expect how they would end. In Tell No One, I truly did not see the ending coming, nor was I sure that Canet wouldn't just kill off one of the main characters before Alex and Margot could reunite. I also liked the happy ending and resolution, something that was missing from the three hitchcock films we’ve watched.

The most prevalent Hitchcockian theme influencing this movie is the notion of the wrong man. Our British mastermind was obsessed with this idea, ever since he was thrown in jail for twenty minutes at the request of his father. In Tell No One, Beck is the wrongly accused man for many things many times. He was the original suspect eight years ago at the moment when Margot was kidnapped. Now, as new evidence resurfaces, he is once again labelled as her murderer, as well as abuser. He must escape conviction and be uncooperative with the police because Margot’s life is in danger, and he was instructed to Tell No One. He has no way to clear his name.

There are some striking cinematic similarities between certain scenes of Tell No One and Vertigo. When Beck has flashbacks to her death and her wedding, the juxtaposition of love and murder is very dark and off putting. The swirling effect of the camera and the uncertainty about what scene is what is reminiscent of Scotty's dream sequences in Vertigo.