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.
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