The Crimson Rivers (2000)

Mathieu Kassovitz's The Crimson Rivers arrives from the year 2000, a period in which a French thriller could concern itself entirely with mutilated corpses, inbred Alpine academics, and the theft of a dead girl's eyes without pausing to instruct anyone on how to feel about it. Jean Reno and Vincent Cassel stalk through the fog of Guernon, two detectives converging on a mountain university whose faculty once dreamed of breeding a master intellect. The film is grim, cold, and occasionally incomprehensible, a fact its own star has cheerfully confirmed. It lectures no one. It buries the audience in snow and glass eyes and lets them find their own way out.

There is a female glaciologist, Fanny, played with a certain frost by Nadia Farès, and she turns out to be the architect of the carnage, which is either a refreshing refusal of victimhood or merely a plot twist. The film does not stop to interrogate what it means. Skinhead antagonists desecrate a grave in the opening act, and the movie treats them as atmosphere, not as an occasion for a seminar on hatred. The villains are eugenicists, so the contempt here is aimed at an intellectual elite's fantasy of perfect bloodlines, not at markets, not at carbon, not at the body. Nobody pauses mid-investigation to affirm anyone.

What remains is craft and mood. The glacier sequences were shot on the Mer de Glace, and the cold is real. The screenplay, adapted from Jean-Christophe Grangé's novel, discards explanation in favor of dread, a trade the director apparently made on purpose. The result is a film that trusts its audience to keep up or to drown. It grossed sixty million dollars and spawned sequels, which suggests the drowning was popular. As a specimen of pre-millennial European pulp, it is almost admirably free of instruction. We are left with two policemen, a mountain, and a great deal of blood in the snow.