‘Out Of Control’: Tallinn Review

Dir: Anne Le Ny. France. 2024. 111min.

The solid foundations of the 15-year marriage between Marie (Elodie Bouchez) and Julien (Omar Sy) are shaken when Marie learns that her husband’s first love Anaëlle (Vanessa Paradis) is back on the scene. Her confidence shaken, Marie stumbles into an affair with a work colleague, Thomas (José Garcia). But while on Marie’s part it’s a passionate but casual relationship, her lover’s obsessive nature takes a dangerous turn in this overwrought domestic thriller by Anne Le Ny.

 Spiralling disasters that are triggered by infidelity

The film, a kind of gender-flipped Fatal Attraction set in and around the town of Vannes, in Brittany, reunites actress-turned-director Le Ny with Sy, with whom she starred in Untouchable; Paradis, the star of her third directorial outing House In Brittany; and Garcia, who starred in her most recent film, Le Torrent. Out Of Control also shares a central theme and a dark tone with Le Torrent: both films deal with spiralling disasters that are initially triggered by infidelity. Like Le Ny’s previous pictures, this is serviceable middlebrow entertainment of the kind that is perhaps best suited to a streaming platform. The always charismatic Sy will be a selling point for the film, which is slated for release in France in the first quarter of 2025.

The relationship between Marie and Julien is loving, certainly, but it has also succumbed to the kind of passion-killing routine and banal domestic stresses that cool even the most ardent of marriages. Le Ny shows Marie and her husband, voices tight with stress, as they bicker over the ancient, failing boiler in the basement of their home. Conversations are exercises in multi-tasking, with Marie wading through the rising tide of family laundry or Julien cooking up a batch of stew for the kids’ dinner. Marie’s readiness to believe that Julien is about to abandon her and their two children for his old flame is perhaps, in part, rooted in her own dissatisfaction.

But when Julian cancels their date night, citing a work emergency, on the same evening that Anaëlle is hosting the opening night of her new bar in the local town, Marie fears the worst. Thomas, an auditor from her company’s head office, just happens to be there to offer a sympathetic ear.

Bouchez’s performance is strong, bringing an empathetic quality to a flawed and self-jeopardising character – Marie seems weak and needy, but she’s also quite shrewd and scheming. “Marie,” says her long-suffering husband, “always gets what she wants.” Meanwhile, anyone with eyes can spot that Thomas is bad news, and Garcia’s increasingly unsettling performance nails the smarminess and opportunism of a manipulator working their malign magic on a vulnerable target.

Then there’s the score, a needling, anxious piano motif that sounds a clear warning. What’s missing, however, is much in the way of tension and a sense of genuine peril. Thomas is creepy – his wide smile as he cuts his hand with glass to prove his devotion is a skin-crawling moment. But the flat filmmaking means that he doesn’t graduate from unnerving pest to being a fully realised threat, something that rather undermines the final act.

There are other issues. Paradis, as the beguiling lost love, feels too inert and insipid to pose a credible threat to Marie’s marriage. And the use of Kintsugi – the Japanese art of mending broken pottery with threads of gold – as a metaphor for resilience and rebuilding feels a little too on the nose. Still, the film captures effectively the precarious nature of marriage, and how one bad decision can tip a relationship out of its routine rut and onto a route to mutual destruction.