Irish Film Institute -IN YOUR HANDS

IN YOUR HANDS

Director: LOLA DOILLON

90 minutes, France, 2010, Subtitled, Colour, D-Cinema


It’s a tribute to Kristin Scott Thomas that instead of plying her trade in middle-of-the-road British prestige dramas, she’s continued to gravitate towards rather edgier French fare, this probing character study being a case in point. When we first meet Scott Thomas’ upscale Paris-resident Anna Cooper, she’s in a state of some dishevelment, but it’s not long before writer-director Lola Doillon winds back to let us experience what she’s just been through – a traumatic abduction which turns the life of this otherwise self-contained medical professional upside down.

Convincing as a somewhat chilly surgeon, she’s absolutely compelling viewing as a woman whose changed circumstances shock her into vulnerability and an altered perspective which comes with it.

Co-star Pio Marmaï is effective too as her alternately abusive and befuddled captor – whose surname Ochberg, after the psychiatrist who first identified Stockholm Syndrome, drops a significant thematic hint about the course of ensuing events. Purposefully unsettling fare. (Notes by Trevor Johnston.)

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