Contre toi (Lola Doillon, 2010)

Kristin Scott Thomas is an actress with great range from restrained and fragile to coldly calculating, and will always be worth watching, but In Your Hands is something of a misstep as film choices go. We see her at first making a dash out of a house where she has been held captive, and then the story rewinds to explain how she was kidnapped and the period of her captivity. The idea that a sort of mutual Stockholm syndrome develops between her, an emotionally isolated doctor, and her captor, an aggrieved husband of one of her former patients, is an interesting one, but ultimately not psychologically convincing, and the apparent determination of the director to provide her with closure against any logical plot progression is frustrating.

5/10

Den 12. mann (Harald Zwart, 2017)

Based on historical events, The 12th Man relates the story of the sole survivor of a failed Norwegian sabotage mission to their home country. Injured, traumatised and pursued relentlessly by the Germans, he's forced to stumble from one hiding place to another, and is only able to do so with the help of numerous locals. It's a thrilling story in a chilling wintry landscape, with echoes of The Revenant as you wonder how he'll survive to make it to the next refuge, never mind all the way to neutral Sweden, even though you know he will due to the film's historicity. The lead Nazi is of course the usual bastard stereotype, but that's a minor quibble with a gripping stab at a subject that is still current for countries that were occupied, 75 years after the event.

7/10