MOVIE REVIEW

Creepiness minus the goose bumps in Dominik Moll's brooding puzzler "Lemming."

By Robert Abele, Special to The Times

Art-house audiences by now are surely accustomed to the ways certain filmmakers have scraped away at bourgeois existence to expose the faulty wiring of destructive impulses underneath. That's why the names Buñuel, Kubrick, Lynch, Polanski and even "gadget-overload" comic genius Jacques Tati may all too easily come to mind over the course of Dominik Moll's brooding puzzler "Lemming."

In the familiar setup, a bright young couple — remote-control gadget designer Alain (Laurent Lucas) and his wife, Benedicte (Charlotte Gainsbourg) — experience a series of bizarre upheavals after they host a dinner for Alain's boss (Andre Dussollier) and his brittle, unfriendly wife, Alice (Charlotte Rampling), whose sparing but provocative venting cuts the evening short. That night, Alain extracts from his sink pipe a furry rodent (to which the title refers); the next day, Alice tries to seduce Alain at work, by which point the weirdness train has officially left the station.

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Moll's last film, the intrusive-stranger thriller "With a Friend Like Harry …," had a delectably nerve-jangling quality, but whenever he searches for similar veins in this scenario he succumbs to a kind of pride of perversion. The theme is hidden desire, but the trip feels like a stale museum tour of the usual psychodrama tropes — voyeurism, ghosts, sexual fantasy, dream imagery, murder — without the goose-bumps-on-your-brain payoff.

The acting is serviceable and primarily of the stare-until-you're-uncomfortable variety, although Rampling is much more than that: She's a classic screen temptress with the aura of a melancholy spider. Whether flinging a drink, deflating someone's confidence or casting a psychic spell, she is Moll's most hauntingly effective partner in unease.

'Lemming'

MPAA rating: Unrated

Distributed by Strand Releasing. Director Dominik Moll. Screenplay Dominik Moll, Gilles Marchand. Producer Michel Saint-Jean. Director of photography Jean-Marc Fabre. Editor Mike Fromentin. In French with English subtitles. Running time: 2 hours, 9 minutes.

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