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Heralded in some quarters as a cool Hitchcockian thriller, "Lemming" by Dominik Moll more precisely calls to mind the work of David Lynch, both in the psychological territory it covers - the eruption of the demonic into apparently pristine suburban lives - and in the atmosphere of creeping weirdness that gathers momentum as those lives are systematically dismantled with forensic detachment. A mess-with-your-head thriller, "Lemming" in some respects resembles a playful younger cousin to Michael Haneke's rather more politicised "Caché", which cast a similarly penetrative gaze on the fragile structures and mores of modern bourgeois living. The movie also bears the hallmarks of a classic Patricia Highsmith fiction, with its upstanding young hero caught out in a fleeting instance of moral compromise and as a result suffering a tidal wave of dire consequence. Unlike Haneke, but very much like Highsmith, and Lynch, one senses Moll's perverse enjoyment as he puts his protagonist Alain Getty (Laurent Lucas) through his paces. The result is a deeply unsettling yet blackly comic and very entertaining movie.Getty and his wife Bénédicte (Charlotte Gainsbourg) have recently relocated to an affluent neighbourhood closer to his new job at a technical engineering company. The next step up the career ladder is to invite his boss Richard Pollock (André Dussollier) and his wife Alice (Charlotte Rampling) for dinner. But what is anticipated as a mundane formality takes a nasty turn when the Pollocks, and specifically Alice, arrive in a sour mood that spills over into acrimony and insult. Rampling's Alice is a queen bitch of queen bitches, resplendent in sunglasses and equipped with a devastatingly frank array of unsmiling revelations. When she turns up after hours at Getty's workplace the next day and attempts to seduce him, Alain's life is set to unravel. His sin is in his equivocation: he resists Alice, but not entirely, and his ensuing guilt renders him less than transparent about the encounter with Bénédicte. It's a mere chink in his moral armour, but it's one that Alice, for reasons known only to herself, exploits to devastating effect. Quite what all this has to do with the Scandinavian lemming that has mysteriously turned up several thousand miles from its natural habitat, jammed in the S-bend under the Getty's kitchen sink, is open to interpretation. But both the lemming and Alice are equally exotic and sudden arrivals in the Getty household, and the former seems to function as a harbinger of the doom brought by the latter.The manner in which Moll transforms the Getty's bland home into a virtually haunted house is quite masterful. With an ominous soundtrack that ticks and throbs and hums with noises that are never clearly defined as real or imagined, "Lemming" is a truly disturbing depiction of the breakdown of a man and his marriage. As Bénédicte and Alice become seemingly one and the same woman, Alain must find a way of ridding himself of the seductress in order to reclaim the wife. It's a task for which Bénédicte quite literally holds the key, but it is going to ask Alain to surrender all remaining trace of moral rectitude.Although it's ultimately a little overlong, this is a fine achievement for Moll, and, for all its influences, it's very much the work of a distinctive individual talent. Well acted, especially by Rampling, and technically assured, with fine cinematography and a coolly effective score, "Lemming" will be an almost surefire hit with fans of morally ambiguous Gallic thrillers in the tradition of Clouzot and Chabrol.
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