Lemming (15)

“I try to play with the audience,” claims director Dominik Moll in the extended interview anchoring this disc, “to keep the tension and the attention.” That explains Lemming, a conventional tale of middle-class marriage on the rocks that ups the ante with apparent supernatural possession and hundreds of the eponymous animals. Like the French Hitchcock Claude Chabrol, Moll peels back the complacent certainties of bourgeois mores as Alain (Laurent Lucas) and Benédicté (Charlotte Gainsbourg) find their lives in a tailspin after Alain’s boss’ suicidal wife (Charlotte Rampling) decides to redecorate their spare room blood red. Genuinely creepy, though indulgently overlong, this psychodrama delivers more than meets the eye. 

DVD Extras:

The opposite’s true of the disc: plentiful extras, little purpose. Six featurettes prove staggeringly shallow. Digital-effects bods yakking about the difficulties of recreating lemming fur in 3-D is likely to drive most people off the nearest cliff.

Print