Trust no one in this convoluted French New Wave thriller, which (on its surface) seems to concern an ex-con who suspects a former partner of duplicity. Every character in the film is looking to double-cross someone, but in the end only the audience is successfully hoodwinked, fooled into attempting to unravel a confusing tangle of unexplained and seemingly unmotivated events, before the jigsaw scenario is cleverly assembled in retrospect. It takes a certain mental alacrity to keep pace with who is plotting what to whom (and why), but the wide-awake will be rewarded with a satisfying solution, although perhaps the final scenes take advantage of one irony too many. Without its complex narrative structure the film would be a more or less straightforward plagiarism of American B-movie crime drama conventions, proving yet again how a skillful imitation can make even the most familiar material fresh again.
Review of The Informer
