Fever

In sharp contrast to the spate of hyper-violent gunplay flicks coming out of France in the last few years, Fever is a subtle murder mystery offering a more abstract and intellectualized take. The film opens with two demented high school buddies, Pierre (Pierre Moure) and Damien (Martin Loizillon), carrying out the (offscreen) murder of a random woman in the Montmartre district of Paris. As it happens, the two adolescents are actually testing a theory they cooked up in their philosophy class: can there be any culpability in a killing that is random and has no motive? (Yes, that sounds ridiculous, but remember this is high school.) Meanwhile, a local woman (Julie-Marie Parmentier) bumps into the two suspicious-looking lads fleeing the aforementioned crime scene, and she instinctively suspects that they are up to no good. Unfortunately, just when viewers would expect the plot to thicken and the suspense to be ramped up, the script descends into incoherence, with the addition of an out-of-the-blue dark historical element appearing like a deus ex machina to dampen the murderous pair's future experiments. Under filmmaker Raphaël Neal's direction, crime and punishment become frustratingly dull concepts—and Fever ultimately offers no compelling visceral aspects to compensate. Optional. (M. Sandlin)