Retrospective: La Chambre des Morts / Melody's Smile (2007)

[Kam-Hung Soh]

La Chambre des Morts / Melody's Smile (2007)
Review by Kam-Hung Soh 2009

In the port city of Dunkirk, a young blind girl is kidnapped. When her 
father tries to pay the ransom, he is accidentally killed and two 
retrenched workers end up with the ransom money. Then another girl, a 
diabetic, is abducted. Without insulin, she would die within a few days.

Among the police assigned to the case is a junior profiler, Lucie 
Hennebelle (Mélanie Laurent). Her investigation leads her to an earlier 
crime scene in the local zoo, where animals have been stolen and 
mutilated by someone related to the kidnappings. As she constructs a 
profile of the kidnappers, we see a possible link between the current 
case and an earlier traumatic event in her life.

This French thriller is very similar in look to Jonathan Demme's 'The 
Silence of the Lambs' (trivia: a copy of the book is visible briefly in 
Lucie's apartment), with a lot of shots of dark corridors in run-down 
mansions and some slightly nauseating scenes involving taxidermy and 
decomposing bodies. For most of its running time, the film maintains a 
realistic tone but as the bodies pile up near the end, the conclusion 
becomes rather predictable.

French with English subtitles.

3 out of 5 stars.

http://vibogafi.blogspot.com/2009/09/review-les-chambre-des-morts-melodys.html

-- 
Kam-Hung Soh
http://vibogafi.blogspot.com