The curse that befalls European stories transported to the United States (Abre Los Ojos becomes Vanilla Sky) is actually a blessing when the travel proceeds in the opposite direction (Match Point set in the Hamptons becomes Match Point set in London). Tell No One (Ne le dis à personne), the award-winning thriller directed by Guillaume Canet, is adapted from Harlan Coben's 2001 American potboiler — now set in France — about a pediatrician called Alex Beck whose wife Margot was brutally murdered by a serial killer at their lake house. Eight years later, Alex begins receiving noir emails with links to surveillance videos that show the missus may still be very much alive (hate it when that happens). Plus, he's being framed all over town for crimes he didn't commit, and relying on a lesbian, a hemophiliac and a whole lot of suspension of disbelief to see him to the end of this paranoid fantasia. The trailer (at left) goes to show how a middling episode of The Rockford Files can be given a sleek and outre makeover by the Gauls.

Andrew O'Hehir of Salon likes it:

Genre-film buffs and Hollywood insiders will study it avidly, and it could do decent late-summer, art-house business. When the inevitable English-language version follows, it will provoke a trivia question (and one I can't answer, at least not without more Internet spelunking than I'm willing to do right now): Name other American movies inspired by foreign-language films based on American novels.

Yeah, but I'm fairly certain Fassbindger once set Henry James's The Ambassadors in an East Berlin S&M club.

Tell No One opens at the Angelika Film Center and City Cinemas on July 2.

[Salon]
[Tell No One website]