User reviews

Though I had some doubts about it, I decided to take a look at this one since the french have been so creative, in a good sense, lately. Unfornately I was wrong. The plot starts out perfectly and takes us deeply into the main character Suzanne, played by Laetitia Casta, but that is all. Such a nice scenario and environment should have been better exploited. Everything goes around Suzanne and her personal issues e specially how these issues get into her inside of the house. When the little girls disappeared and Suzanne discovered this mysterious basement involved in a supernatural environment I was expecting the real emotion but that also failed. A good plot could have saved this perfect scenario and great actress, who plays perfectly her character.

The French film titled Derriere les murs (Behind the Walls - 2011), lasting 1h 30 min, focuses on a writer who isolates herself on a rural property to write a book. The beginning of the film arouses curiosity and becomes quite obvious that the film had a careful investment in the scenery, with excellent costumes, photography and lighting, in addition to a small group of good actors. The story starts well, but as the film progresses, it ends up getting lost, to the point that it is up to those who watched it until the end, the decision to infer what really happened. In my opinion, from a certain point in the film, the excess of the medicine taken by the writer, which caused hallucinations, ends up participating in the cast.

Filmed on location in splendid French rural landscapes ,"Derrière Les Murs" spares us special effects,monsters,gore ,and we should be grateful just for that;this is actually hardly a horror and fantasy movie .The music and the treatment are deceptive;so is Casta's performance,whose face remains mysterious and inscrutable,a la Nicole Kidman in "the others" she often recalls ,particularly in the scene her pupil reads "the little red riding Hood" (which is nothing but a wrong track).

As a psychological drama,the ending makes sense ;as a horror flick ,it must have disappointed its audience .When she wanders through the darkness of the basement,the heroine is actually in search of herself :although she has an affair with a man who tries to help her ,she remains a stranger in a land where she is an intruder .

The movie is essentially diurnal ,except from some lovely scenes such as the villagers' torches ,dots of lights searching the blackness of the night.

Roger Dumas,who played the part of Gabin's son in "Rue Des prairies"(1959) ,appears as an old priest.