The Page Turner

Young Mélanie is a mightily determined piano student whose scholarship audition is ruined when her concentration is broken by Ariane, a pianist on the judging panel. Fast-forward ten years. The obsessiveness which had driven Mélanie’s music has become the force behind her thirst for retribution against the older woman. She works her way into Ariane’s family, becoming indispensable as her page turner and emotional support. Mélanie believes that revenge is a dish best served cold, and here it served with the glacial perfection which the French have learned to savour only too well. The brilliantly clinical way in which psychological pathology becomes plausible as the stuff of suspense puts this film into the territory of Patricia Highsmith or Henri-Georges Clouzot. Director Denis Dercourt is a classically trained musician who plays viola and teaches at the Strasburg Conservatory as well as making films about musicians. Here he has made a beautifully controlled film in which the chill of deeply nourished hatred and the fragility of artistic inspiration are conveyed with an absolutely elegant economy of style.

A classy chamber piece. It's quiet, refined and understated, but still as satisfying as it is unsettling.

Channel 4 (UK)