She's One of Us

The often conflicting human desire for both social acceptance and liberated individuality are at all-out war in this disconcerting film, a striking debut from director Siegrid Alnoy starring Sasha Andres. The spare script—by Alnoy, Jérôme Beaujour, and François Favrat—could have been the blueprint for a very pedestrian horror flick: Andres' character Christine Blanc is a lonely temp office worker who will go to great lengths to ingratiate herself with her coworkers, starting with outright lies about herself and escalating from there. But Alnoy's deceptively sedate pacing and cinematographer Christophe Pollock's achingly desolate imagery go further, creating a hauntingly oppressive aura of bleak emotional isolation, and Andres is simultaneously chilling and sympathetic as a woman out of step with the rest of the world, and miserable about it. Should social conformity, taken to extremes, be considered a kind of psychosis, as Alnoy seems to be suggesting? This is one of the conundrums that this sometimes frustrating but always fascinating film presents. Recommended. [Note: DVD extras include seven deleted scenes (36 min.), a 35-minute “making-of” featurette, the short film “Nos Enfants” (6 min.), and trailers. Bottom line: a solid extras package for a disturbing film.] (M. Johanson)