Black Box (2021)

Black Box arrives with the sober bearing of a film that has no interest in being liked by the culture desk. Yann Gozlan's thriller follows a black box analyst through the wreckage of a plane crash and into a corporate cover-up, and it does so with the patience of a man assembling a model ship. There is no messaging layer here, no scene in which a character turns to the camera and explains how we ought to live. The aviation industry is rendered as a machine of competing interests, which is a fine setting for suspense and a poor one for sermonizing.

The film's faint political pulse comes from its villains, a security firm that blackmails an investigator to bury evidence of faulty systems. This is the conspiracy thriller's oldest instinct, the corporation as shadowy hand, and it registers as texture instead of thesis. Noémie, the analyst's wife, loses her job for his snooping and later walks into the Paris Air Show to broadcast the confession that destroys the firm. She is given competence and a final act of agency. She is not given an argument. The ensemble, meanwhile, is a standard French arrangement, with a few actors of North African descent appearing in ordinary professional roles that the script never bothers to notice, which is either a quiet virtue or simply the absence of a thought.

On the matter of instruction, the film declines entirely. It shows a man unravel and lets the audience draw conclusions. The result is a taut, well-made procedural with almost nothing to say about the present moment's preferred subjects, and it seems content with that. We can respect the restraint. We can also note that restraint is not the same as relevance.