Red lights

(Herald rating * * *)

Slinky, sinister and reminiscent of Hitchcock or the French master of psychosexual drama Claude Chabrol, this cleverly plotted thriller-cum-road movie is engrossing but hampered by a glib ending.

Adapting a novel by Maigret creator Georges Simenon set in America in the 1950s, it concerns a Parisian couple, Antoine (Darroussin) and Helene (Bouquet), who are driving to Bordeaux to collect their children from summer camp. Antoine is a pasty, balding, hangdog insurance clerk who resents his wife's success as a lawyer and, before long, their apparently customary bickering begins to open up large cracks in their marriage.

His passive-aggressive displays include turning off the motorway when she is supposed to be navigating and stopping every half-hour to slug back shots of whisky in roadside bars while she waits outside. When she makes good on a warning to abandon him and take the train, the film abruptly shifts gear and becomes a darker, nastier tale.

There's a distinctly Gallic inflection to the story-telling that treats what is essentially a display of childish petulance as the jumping-off point for a menacing psychological thriller.

And there's an impressive grace in the way the film shifts between the real and the imagined, the actual and the symbolic, while keeping us constantly unsure where the boundaries lie.

Kahn directs with a firm hand, keeping things hermetically sealed - most of the dialogue occurs in the car's eerily silent interior, from which all road noise has been stripped so that when the world does intrude on the marriage it is shocking. And it's hard to tear your eyes away from Daroussin's watchful and supremely naturalistic performance even though he's really just a prick.

The gathering sense of dread is, paradoxically, intensified by the soothing Debussy on the soundtrack and, as night falls, Kahn uses shadows to powerful effect - although the most nerve-racking scene, involving a series of frantic phone calls, takes place in the harsh daylight of a hangover.

But it's hard not to feel let down by the last act. There's a case to be made that the ending underlines the point the film has been making about the male-female power struggle - but it feels more like a cop-out.

CAST: Jean-Pierre Darroussin, Carole Bouquet, Vincent Deniard, Jean-Pierre Gos
DIRECTOR: Cedric Kahn
RUNNING TIME: 110 minutes
RATING: M, sexual references
SCREENING: Academy