Critics reviews

It's a murder mystery without a murder, an anti-thriller operating on tenuous testimonies... Here, action is verbal and it only deepens the inscrutability of events. I miss films like this... Amalric's direction never falters: the room empties out, abruptly, and the knotted stitching unravels, revealing a frighteningly linear causal thread. Crime, then punishment. Blink and you'll miss: they make them, infrequently, like they used to.

This chilling miniature dispenses with the screw-turning mechanics of the traditional murder mystery to ask one question: what is it like to feel guilty? In fact, the question is more like, feeling guilty is awful, but how awful?

In addition to Amalric's rapier-like direction and the cast's nuanced acting, what makes the movie compelling is, paradoxically, that Julien's qualities are so unremarkably human.

As an actor, [Amalric has] long specialized in playing unhinged fuck-ups for other filmmakers but, under his own sure directorial hand, allows himself an impressive restraint to match the rigor of his mise-en-scene: Amalric's famously expressive peepers do less work here than the disorienting close-ups and boxy aspect ratio, which combine to convey a potent sense of claustrophobia and doom.

Each successive bit of information complicates the plot, and by the end, when we've seen them all, we can understand the misconceptions of those who have not, since they're locked into mindsets that viewers may themselves have had earlier on in the narrative. It's a sneaky, smart way to conduct what could have been a standard-issue thriller, and Amalric carries it off with aggressive style and panache.

Amalric's careful yet exuberant direction is nothing new. His first five fiction features utilize depth more expertly than most 3D features, but here his images have been wrought with laser precision... The subtle directionality of the compositions and the constant shifts from the present to the past, "The Blue Room" often feels like a work of cinematic futurism, not dissimilar to the films of Steven Soderbergh.

Amalric—an actor whose fidgety, neurotic charm has made him one of the most distinctive presences in contemporary French cinema—has been making eccentric, under-the-radar films since the mid-'90s; The Blue Room represents his leanest, most morose, and most handsomely accomplished work, distinguished by enigmatic close-ups, lush orchestrations, and delicate lighting. It envelops the viewer in Julien's headspace.

Mr. Amalric, who directed this dark, delectable, shivery tale, adapting it from the Georges Simenon novel, sets its uneasy, dank mood with energetic economy. The opening credits have scarcely ended before he's begun arranging his people and parts, mixing shots of the hotel with those of a woman's damp neck circled with pearls and her shoulder beaded with sweat.

The Blue Room is by far his most adventurous film—tantalizing, fractured, and, at 76 minutes, beautifully concise. While it pushes the boat out stylistically, it's also very faithful to the formal nature of Simenon's book, which shows a certain laudable modesty on Amalric's part.

For all of his gifts as a filmmaker—the greatest of which may be his shocking and rare anti-auteurism, having gone from the sprawling, Cassavetian ensemble piece On Tour to this spare and calculated affair—it would be foolish to not point out how greatly Amalric's film depends on the greatness of his own performance. His dark, bulbous, concentrically limned eyes are among the most iconic of his generation, but rarely have they been tasked with expressing more than they have been here.

Shame and regret hang over every scene, and the feelings only deepen the longer the movie goes on. This is less of a whodunit than a psychological portrait of one man as he unravels, his guilt ever in question. For all its surface effectiveness, however, The Blue Roomnever quite makes that intangible leap into greatness. It's a phenomenally executed exercise that, like its protagonist's memory, is too wispy for its own good.

We see elements of Chabrol, Hitchcock, Lang, Preminger, and Resnais, but Amalric owns the final product. During a trial, a face-on montage of successive witnesses stresses their subjectivity. An exit from a courtroom is filmed like a final curtain. A sense of claustrophobia pervades the film, as does the nostalgia of a conventional thriller, with academy ratio and classic studio music put to powerful effect.