Don't Look Back

Director Marina de Van's Don't Look Back is part ghost story, part psychological thriller, and all overblown faux-French hooey. Jeanne (Sophie Marceau), a celebrated writer of nonfiction, is so devastated when her autobiographical first novel is rejected that she not only starts to have panic attacks but also begins to question reality. In the mirror, Jeanne's face looks unfamiliar, while her furniture appears to be both stylistically different and out of place. Before long, our heroine believes she is being possessed by the image in the reflection, a haunted woman (Monica Bellucci) who is experiencing something frighteningly similar. While her first feature film (the ode to self-mutilation In My Skin) suggested de Van's ability to work within unusual subject areas, this resolutely obtuse and often pointless film is as cold as a glacier and just as purposefully paced. The viewer waits around for something/anything to happen, as the stars coast along on their beauty and little else. While the concept can work—consider the brilliant Polish film The Double Life of Véronique, for example—Don't Look Back is too willfully esoteric to truly connect. Not a necessary purchase. (B. Gibron)