Rapt

Directed by Lucas Belvaux. Starring Yvan Attal, Anne Consigny, Andre Marcon, Françoise Fabian, Alex Descas, Michel Voita 15A cert, Light House, Dublin, 125 min

LUCAS BELVAUX, director of an acclaimed eponymous trilogy, takes a scalpel to middle-class French society with this fascinating, if dry and procedural, kidnapping drama. Inspired by a 1978 incident involving one Edouard-Jean Empain, Raptveers between melodrama and social satire without ever allowing its narrative momentum to slacken. I smell an English-language remake.

Yvan Attal, always at his best when oily, plays the director of a large conglomerate who, within seconds of the film beginning, gets snatched by an efficient gang of single-minded hoodlums. They slice off one of his fingers and send the digit to his loved ones with a demand for several million euro.

Almost immediately, a fissure opens between the concerns of the family and those of the business. It turns out that the protagonist has been a naughty boy and – when not romancing a slew of mistresses – has spent too much time and money at the world’s roulette tables. As his wife tears her hair, his former colleagues attempt to wriggle their way out of paying the money.

Filmed in wide-screen, edited with slick dispassion, Raptdepicts the machinations of the police and the villains with admirable clarity. An attempted money exchange late in the film stands as a model of lucid exposition.

The film is, however, mostly notable for its experiments in morality and its willingness to toy with the audience’s need to identify. The protagonist is not a nice man. He’s a liar, a philanderer and an egotist. Nonetheless, the manner in which forces mount up against him (he loses his reputation as well as his finger) inevitably inspires a swelling of sympathetic outrage.

His final horrible torment is worthy of a Jacobean tragedy (and is about as melodramatic).