Who Killed Bambi?

Since Gilles Marchand co-wrote both Laurent Cantet’s ‘Human Resources’ and Dominik Moll’s ‘Harry, He’s Here to Help’, there were high hopes for his first feature as director. It has a good premise, no question: a trainee-nurse – nervous of assisting in operations and herself awaiting surgery for an inner-ear condition threatening her sense of balance – begins to suspect a strangely attractive doctor of sinister nocturnal practices. But unfortunately it never quite delivers.  The problem doesn’t lie in the casting; new face Sophie Quinton is well chosen and adequate as Isabelle, the novice who notices phials of anaesthetic drugs are going missing, while the simpatico if slightly creepy Laurent Lucas is effective as the not-exactly-good Docteur Philippe, who spends more time prowling around private rooms occupied by post-op female patients than is good for him, them or, it transpires, anyone else. Nor initially is the script at fault; despite Marchand’s fairly rudimentary by-numbers direction, the narrative’s pacy and astute enough to play on widely held anxieties regarding vulnerability in hospitals. But the rot sets in halfway through, when everything starts getting absurdly attenuated and repetitive and the hitherto ignored option of Isabelle contacting the cops becomes a painfully obvious solution. By then the film, taking its cues from genre cliché, has lost touch with ‘reality’. One hesitates to suggest a firm producer was needed, but someone, surely, must have noticed the movie was going off the rails.