A jet-setting industrialist with a lavish gambling problem and a petty extra-marital affair. This is all we know about Stanislas Graff (Yvan Attal) before he's kidnapped, five minutes into Lucas Belvaux's French thriller. So, who cares if this arrogant prick lives or dies? But immediately following the jarring abduction scene, Belvaux mercifully pulls the reins way back before anyone launches into swashbuckling renegade mode, à la 2008's Taken. Instead, the focus shifts almost entirely from Graff. We see his business partners scramble to pick up the financial pieces and the police engaging in a plodding game of chess with the kidnappers. Most weighty and affecting, however, are the realizations faced by Graff's wife (the ever-graceful Anne Consigny, again, as in A Christmas Tale, taking a turn as the one steadfast figure in an otherwise deteriorating environment) that her husband isn't who she thought he was. Belvaux, who wrote the script, defies genre expectations at every turn while still providing apt doses of tension and depravity.
