Feux Rouges (Cédric Kahn, 2004)

Red Lights kicks off with the conventional French family drama set-up of a bickering couple driving off to pick their kids up from summer camp. But, being armed with the knowledge that it's based on a Georges Simenon thriller, transposed from its original American setting, the rapidity with which their trip disintegrates unsettles from the first minutes, even before a series of hallucinatory interludes intrudes.
The allusions to Hitchcock are evident, but unlike in the case of of ineptly aping thriller hacks like De Palma or a host of other directors' winking pastiches, there's a genuine freshness about Kahn's selective referencing. He doesn't plunder scenes or characters, just techniques, and the effect becomes quite startling, as the husband spirals through a night of scotch-gorging madness on the eerie side roads of rural France.
In consequence, you end up as much without a road map through the film as the directionless driver, a neat mirroring effect which then makes you question what is really going on, to far more disquieting effect than any number of road-cum-slasher flicks. Furthermore, after all that, Kahn's film actually has the audacity to say something. It certainly falls short of the profundity that it fancies itself for having, but it's still quite a juggling feat.

7/10