Editor's Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on June 21, 2001, and we're proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
After a lengthy period in which American slasher films and murder thrillers were inspired to varying degrees by European genre movies, things have come full circle with the likes of The Crimson Rivers, a French production directly influenced by the U.S. serial-killer trend. A critical blurb in the ads screams that it’s “Seven meets Silence of the Lambs”—a spurious bit of quote-whoring, as aside from a crucified-victim tableau, there is nothing in the movie to directly suggest Jonathan Demme’s hit. But there’s quite a bit that fans of the David Fincher film will find familiar, from the pairing of a world-weary, middle-aged detective with a brash younger cop to individual setpieces, particularly a chase-and-confrontation scene with the hooded killer.
One way the film echoes Stateside serial-murder standards is by focusing on the aftermaths of the slayings, rather than presenting the crimes as they happen. But their circumstances are certainly baroque enough. The first victim is found with his hands lopped off and the stumps cauterized, his eyes scooped out and multiple torturous incisions (all of which, we’re told, he was alive to experience); for good measure, his body has been discovered hanging 150 feet up a precipice. Arriving from Paris to the small-town scene of the crime is Inspector Niemans (Jean Reno), who discovers the remote mountain village to be an insular college community where a certain amount of intellectual inbreeding has been going on amongst the professors. Could this have something to do with what soon becomes a series of killings? But of course, as the French say, though it takes a while for director Mathieu Kassovitz (who scripted with Jean-Christophe Grangé from the latter’s novel) to get to the connection.
The pace overall is more deliberate than it should be, and it isn’t until the hour mark of this 106-minute film that its dual protagonists even meet. Up to that point, young officer Max Kerkerian (Vincent Cassel, from Kassovitz’s acclaimed debut film Hate) has been looking into the desecration of a little girl’s tomb, an investigation that leads him to the child’s mother, now an insane nun who has taken the “Vow of Shadows.” That means that she’s shut up in a subterranean chamber, where Max must interview her in one of the movie’s creepier scenes; the woman’s talk of “demons” suggests a supernatural element that is ultimately subjugated in favor of more prosaic skullduggery.
Throughout it all, Kassovitz eschews the jagged energy of Hate for a more traditional presentation, albeit with occasional striking flourishes: the camera descending down the center of a spiral staircase, lightning illuminating the cross carved through the wall of an otherwise pitch-black mausoleum. Other times, his indulgences just seem silly, as when Kerkerian’s interrogation of some young punks leads into a Hong Kong-style martial-arts brawl. Kassovitz’s adoption of this further foreign influence momentarily suggests that Crimson Rivers might be intended as a modern genre pastiche, but it winds up feeling simply out of place.
Holding the movie together is the great Reno, whose gravity and dignity as Niemans are redolent of the qualities Morgan Freeman brought to Se7en. But a more pertinent point of reference is the pair of Alex Cross films Freeman starred in (Kiss the Girls and Along Came a Spider); here, as there, the fine central turn gives a strong center to a conventionally told, occasionally implausible story. Gratifyingly, TriStar (which dubbed the German film Anatomy for its brief U.S. theatrical run) is honoring Reno’s performance by releasing Crimson Rivers in the original French, taking a chance this time that mainstream genre audiences will respond to a subtitled feature. Even more gratifyingly, they may be right; the off-the-street crowd at the preview I attended reacted enthusiastically to the film’s stray moments of genuine excitement and humor. Were the movie cleverer, scarier and/or more dramatically satisfying, TriStar might have had a Crouching Tiger-like crossover hit on its hands.
As it stands, Crimson Rivers is never less than watchable, occasionally tense and, on a technical level at least, the equal of its no doubt larger-budgeted American cousins. Thierry Arbogast’s widescreen photography is by turns handsome and creepy; Bruno Coulais’ score provides the right mood while establishing an identity separate from serial-killer music specialists like Howard Shore; and the sporadic makeup FX by Jean-Christophe Spadaccini and Denis Gastou are first-rate. On the acting front, Reno is well-supported by Cassel, Nadia Farès as a geology student who assists Niemans and such French veterans as Jean-Pierre Cassel and Dominique Sanda. Sharp-eyed foreign genre fans might also recognize Philippe Nahon, who made an indelible impression as I Stand Alone’s antihero, playing a highway worker—and they could certainly be forgiven for wishing for more of the inspiration and idiosyncrasy of that Gallic film, as opposed to the slick capitulation to international mainstream interests that Crimson Rivers represents.
