In Your Hands (2012)

In Your Hands is without doubt the best Kristin Scott Thomas movie to be released this month. Okay, it's an exaggeration but there's no denying the actress is prolific right now and it's not any throwaway fluff she's starring in - In Your Hands continues her current trend to seek out demanding and challenging roles in thought-provoking movies.

Lola Doillon's drama drops us right in the mix: a distressed Scott Thomas races from a shoddy house. She scurries down the street, keeping her eyes peeled for something. She makes it home to her lavish Parisian apartment, listens to her voice messages, and climbs into bed. The next day she goes to work and then she goes to the police station where she makes a statement that she was held captive by a man for days. The policeman asks her to take it from the top:

She was coming home a few nights ago when she was snatched from the street at knifepoint. The man, Yenn (Marmai), takes her home and locks her in a walled up room. Yenn is no psychopath, though - he has a beef and lays a terrible accident at the hands of Scott Thomas' OBGYN. However, the longer she's in that room, the more she comes to rely on Yenn and she begins to have feeling towards him.

It might amount to nothing more than a case study in Stockholm Syndrome, but Doillon keeps the audience in doubt as to how it all turns out - the opening sequence's trip to the police station is not the end of it. However, how it all turns out is hard to swallow. The build-up to what goes down is fine but the logical conclusion to Stockholm Syndrome, or as how Doillon imagines it to be, doesn't sit right. Where as that could be accused as clumsy, the writer-director skilfully deals with the slow attraction between the two. Doillon plays around with the notion that these two are a couple: she slaps him on one occasion like an annoyed spouse; later she tells him, 'I'm mad at you.' She doesn't like it when he plays loud music.

Kristin Scott Thomas is again superb but apart from a smart middle section, In Your Hands won't stay in your memory for long.