BLACK HEAVEN - **

DDirected by Gilles Marchand, starring Gregoire Leprince-Ringuet, Louise Bourgoin, Melvil Poupaud, Pauline Etienne. Thriller, France, 2010, cert 15, 100 mins.

Released on DVD by Arrow Video on September the 5th

Two french teenagers Gaspard and Marion are fooling around in a seaside changing room when they discover an apparently lost mobile phone. Gaspard wants to turn it in, but when they find photos on the phone of a mysterious blond woman, and intercept some intriguing text messages, Marion persuades Gaspard to investigate. Finding instructions for a rendezvous in a church later that night they spy the blond woman Audrey (Bouroin, from The Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec) meet with a young man. They pair seem impossibly stylish and draped in alluring mystery to the teenagers who then follow them.

This leads to Gaspard (Marion is dropped from the plot quite early) becoming obsessed with Audrey and with an online game called Black Hole which she plays. Through this obsession Gaspard comes into the orbit of the sinister Vincent, a man who seems to have some hold over Audrey and who may be using the online game to play dark role plays that have dangerous effects in the real world.

This French thriller has some plot parallels with last year’s terrible Hideo Nakata thriller Chatroom. It shares the theme of a disturbed individual using the internet and social networks (and in this case an MMORPG) to manipulate the weak willed. It also seems to aspire to explore an abusive relationship between a psychopath and a femme fatale similar to David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. However it is neither as jaw droopingly awful as Chatroom, a film that is almost compulsively terrible, nor as dark and deliciously sinister as Lynch’s masterpiece.

Like Chatroom, Black Heaven seems to have been made by filmmakers with only a basic grasp of the internet - the French teenagers use MySpace! And absolutely no idea about online gaming. The virtual world of the Black Hole game is decently rendered in CG - just as well as there are several long sequences set in the fantasy cyber-world - but it looks like an incredibly tedious game to play. Long passages of wandering about, with short fight sequences where the player hammers some random keys until the other player’s avatar falls over. It’s not exactly World of Warcraft.

The screenplay by director Marchand and Dominik Moll (director of Lemming and Harry, He’s Here To Help) fails to present compelling characters. The key relationship between Vincent and Audrey is particularly thin, it is never clear what hold Vincent has over her, is he her pimp, lover, drug dealer? Audrey herself is little more than a loose collection of Hitchcock-blonde cliches. The plot begins from an dubious coincidence (the chance discovery of a mobile phone) and requires Gaspard to make several highly unlikely choices that seem to exist merely to advance the story rather than make any sense. The whole affair feels undercooked and never develops any real menace or sense of threat. Although the film is well shot there is unfortunately little here of any real interest.

Stuart Barr.

GORE IN THE STORE
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5 STAR FAB - 1 STAR RUBBISH