Ksenia Rappoport plays Sonia. Photo / Supplied
I'm not entirely sure that this sleek and classy Italian psychological thriller plays fair with its audience. But I'm even less sure that if I watched it a dozen times I'd be able to spot the moments when it cheated.
No matter. It's a highly polished chinese puzzle of a
mystery that is easier to follow than to solve and it features a couple of pitch-perfect performances, both of which sustain the possibility that a character could be a villain without realising the fact.
Rappoport plays Sonia, a Slovenian chambermaid in a Turin hotel.
At a speed-dating evening she meets the shy and lonely Guido (Timi) who, we will soon learn, was a cop and is now a security guard. From that point on we are sure about pretty much nothing. A crime occurs, one character is killed, another injured, both are suspect and then, about the film's mid-point, we are asked to re-evaluate everything we've been watching through an entirely different prism.
This summary is intentionally obscure but, oddly, the film isn't. Tantalisingly ambiguous and playful, it's like a blend of Hitchcock and the Coens (though there's no black humour here, the edgy soundtrack keeps the tension up).
