Hotel Harabati/De particulier a particulier

If you are an enthusiast of the work of Michael Haneke (and you have decided to emerge from the dank cellar in which you sleep) then you may enjoy picking holes in this debut feature from Brice Cauvin.

Hotel Harabati, a bewildering exercise in low-key French surrealism, plays similar games to those in Haneke's Hidden and shares the Austrian director's enthusiasm for scowling at the bourgeoisie.

This arid, unhurried film, in which a Parisian couple go slightly mad after happening upon a mysterious holdall, manages to spread a satisfying degree of unease about the place, but, unlike Haneke's better films, never persuades us to care that its accumulating questions remain unanswered.

While waiting in a train station, Philippe (Laurent Lucas) and Marion (Hélène Fillières) get into conversation with a distinguished middle-eastern gentleman. Somehow or other they end up with his bag and - in the first of many, many puzzling decisions - allow the lurking presence of uniformed policemen to dissuade them from handing it into lost-and-found.

You will hardly need to be told that the bag contains money, but further developments do manage to confound expectations. Having lied to their friends about travelling to Venice, the couple finds their holiday photographs do, indeed, contain snaps of that picturesque city. Marion becomes inexplicably paranoid and barricades herself in her apartment. Bombs start going off around Paris. There's a lot of chatter about a shower curtain. And so forth.

We begin in a safe place and watch as - gradually, insidiously - disconcerting fractures in the urban masquerade widen and cause the characters to loose their grip on reality. Post-9/11 angst hangs about the place, as do fatal whiffs of middle-class ennui.

Composed of long scenes, shot in flat light, the drama just about holds the attention until, in its last, fatally misguided moments, it offers up a conventionally optimistic ending that would not seem out of place in a commercial for package holidays.

If this were truly a Haneke film, the realistic viewer could console himself with the certain knowledge that a gang of deranged bikers waits round the corner, ready to chop the surviving characters into kebabs. No such mayhem here.