A young filmmaking student moves into a new flat in a suburban French neighbourhood. He rides his bike around town. And tapes his new location. A fat black cat crosses his path and with a squeal of brakes he avoids the cat, but crashes his bike - breaking the bike chain and his phone in the process.
He notices a taxi parked at a house nearby, but he finds that the driver is off-duty. He asks if he can borrow the phone to call a taxi, the man offers to call for him, leaving the boy to wait outside. The boy, Yannick realises that he is quite wounded and instead of waiting, invites himself inside to clean up his hand and his forearm.
That's when he notices something strange and gets sucked into the torture chamber of blood at 5150 Elm's Way. The suspense has a calm approach. Alot of the early violence and gore is subdued. The father Jacques Beaulieu (Normand D'Amour) is cool, calm and controlled. A master of the situation. And a chess champion. Yannick, the boy, is in panic mode from the beginning.
Yannick Berube (Marc-André Grondin) is however enough of sound mind to attempt escape at every opportunity. Meeting failure with repeated failure, and yet his instinct for survival, his keenness to escape never calms, never falters. He is a hundred times stopped, and he is just as hopeful, just as optimistic.
The cinematography is pedestrian, but the drama comes from the consistently building story and its events and surprises. We follow Yannick's plea for help in the form of a video cassette as it makes its way out into the world.
Will someone find it and save him?
"A clean kill, with no pain! Don't you get it?"
Until Yannick has a broken leg and it is as if he has a broken spirit. He still tries to escape but his heart is not in it.
Jacques is a believable villain but with not a very strong presence. The girl, Michelle (Mylène St-Sauveur) seems obedient if a little boring - no character in the eyes. The wife is ordinary.
The game is essential to the plot in the middle half of the film. Not the most exciting cat and mouse, but a match of wits is intellectually interesting. Yannick is outmatched and outgunned. Still he tries to win.
The longer Yannick stays trapped in that room, cabin fever begins to set in. His visions consume him and yet he still hopes to win. The family falls apart around him and still he is locked up tight. A strange turn of events towards the end of the film has the invalid wife wanting out while the young Yannick wants to stay so he can challenge Jacques and beat him finally.
The ending mirrors American slasher films with everybody desperately killing everybody else. With one unexpected shotgun blast to the head schocker. And then a surrealist solution: one last vision, one last game.
"We have to finish the game, okay?"
2.5 stars
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