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PRODUCTION France

Thrillers on the rise

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Like the screen adaptation of Harlan Coben’s Tell No One [+see also:
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film profile
]
by Guillaume Canet, which drew over 850,000 film-goers (and €5m in box office takings) in its first week, the police-thriller genre is currently experiencing renewed interest among French producers.

Some of the several thrillers include Régis Wargnier’s Have Mercy on Us All [+see also:
trailer
film profile
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, written by Fred Vargas (see article), which will be released on January 24, 2007; RMR-73 [+see also:
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film profile
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by Olivier Marchal (36 quai des Orfèvres [+see also:
trailer
film profile
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), starring Daniel Auteuil, which will start filming in February; Truands by Frédéric Schoendoerffer, starring Benoît Magimel, Philippe Caubère and Béatrice Dalle, out on January 17; and, last but not least, Second Wind by Alain Corneau (see news).

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Among the most sought after sources of inspiration at the moment in France is novelist Franck Thilliez. Gaumont has recently acquired rights to his latest work, La forêt des ombres, while his previous novel, La Chambre des morts (lit. “The Room of the Dead”), will be made into a film by Alfred Lot and kicks off its ten-week shoot in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region and Paris in January. Starring Mélanie Laurent, Jérémie Renier, Eric Caravaca and Gilles Lellouche, this thriller has a morbid cruelty and psychopathy that have received literary criticism comparable to The Silence of the Lambs.

Produced by Charles Gassot for Produire à Paris, La Chambre des morts opens with two unemployed computer technicians (Renier and Lellouche) who one night knock down a man in a field of windmills and find €2m next to the dead body. The money that they find deepens their pre-existing dominator-dominated relationship. The next day, a young blind girl is found dead near the site of the accident and it seems that the stolen money had been intended to pay her ransom. Another child is then kidnapped and the police carry out an investigation, in particular a young sergeant (Laurent) who is fascinated by the tragic event.

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(Translated from French)

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