Scribe

If you didn’t know that this fea­ture debut from direc­tor Thomas Kruitof’s came out in 2017, you might think that it had orig­i­nal­ly hit cin­e­ma screens in the late ​’90s. Full of straight-faced sus­pi­cion, sus­pense and a whole lot of grey, Scribe is a film that buck­les under their weight of its Amer­i­can thriller inspi­ra­tions. It boasts a shal­low sto­ry­line which hides behind large-scale polit­i­cal themes and also hin­ders the cen­tral dra­ma, mak­ing even this rel­a­tive­ly curt run­time feel like a drag.

We fol­low the mild-man­nered, ex-alco­holic office clerk, Duval (François Cluzet), whose cur­rent unem­ploy­ment finds him in a shady job tran­scrib­ing taped phone calls for a mys­te­ri­ous fig­ure known only as Clé­ment (Denis Poda­ly­dès). Cru­cial plot points emanate through muf­fled voice record­ings on cas­sette tapes, and our imag­i­na­tion is allowed to run away from us. Ten­sion turns to dread as we join him as he plunges down the rab­bit hole.

The use of more prim­i­tive tech­nol­o­gy such as a type­writer and a cas­sette play­er gifts the film with cool retro visu­als. Clé­ment uses the excuse that con­tem­po­rary elec­tron­ics are too eas­i­ly infil­trat­ed, which is a nice cov­er. Regret­tably, how­ev­er, the beau­ti­ful cin­e­matog­ra­phy and sound design enabled by these ana­logue machines is not employed any­where else in the film. This makes the sud­den atten­tion to detail feel like a glar­ing aside, and high­lights the fact that this is a cos­met­ic visu­al strat­e­gy, and noth­ing more.

Cluzet’s per­for­mance stands out as he projects Duval’s grad­ual neu­ro­sis and empha­sis­es the grav­i­ty of the sit­u­a­tion through expres­sion alone. One scene in par­tic­u­lar sees the recluse unwill­ing­ly par­tic­i­pate in actions that leave him vis­i­bly shak­en. This only lasts so long, how­ev­er, as his sud­den char­ac­ter change in the third act feel more arti­fi­cial than natural.

Sim­i­lar­ly, a sub­plot involv­ing Duval and fel­low AA mem­ber, Sara (Alba Rohrwach­er), appears con­trived: their qua­si-parental/ro­man­tic rela­tion­ship estab­lish­es an unnat­ur­al pas­sage to the sad­ly under­whelm­ing finale. There are pos­i­tives with­in Scribe’s struc­ture, but it is much more mem­o­rable for its aes­thet­ics than any nar­ra­tive or emo­tion­al sub­stance. Still, as a debut fea­ture it def­i­nite­ly demon­strates potential.