Black Heaven

Cannes (Midnight Screening) – The danger is all online in this French thriller, with a video game seemingly holding the key to unraveling a suicide mystery. Paul Martin logs on.

Gaspard (Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet, looking like a cross between Ryans Reynolds and Gosling) is a teen in love. He carries joy in his heart and a permanent tent-pole in his shorts, as he and inamorata Marion (Pauline Etienne) bask in the glow of a relationship as hot and as sunny as the Southern French coastal region where they reside.

Their youthful curiosity is not simply limited to exploring the interiors of one another's mouths with their tongues; a found mobile phone seems to offer invitation for a spot of mischief, allowing them to be voyeurs at the first meeting between a boy named Dragon and girl named Sam (the latter being played by Louise Bourgoin). Spying on their quarry as they rendezvous in a church, Gaspard and Marion trail them to a hardware emporium, where Dragon unexpectedly chooses to stock up on piping, before tracking them to a remote outcrop, where they promptly lose their targets.

A satisfactory conclusion to the intrigue seemingly denied to them, the lovebirds are in no way disappointed to fill the remainder of their afternoon with that time-honoured favourite activity of teenagers the world over – making out. However, when sunshine gives way to the gloaming, their earlier wannabe detective fun also resurfaces in darker form, with them happening across Dragon and Sam, the purchased tubing having been utilised to pump fumes from their car's exhaust pipe into the vehicle itself. Dragon is beyond help, Sam is narrowly saved.

Having surreptitiously pocketed the videotape that the apparent suicide-pacters had been making of their deaths, Gaspard finds himself both troubled by the incident and fascinated by Sam, a statuesque blonde beauty he subsequently discovers is really named Audrey, and is the sister of a petty bully of a local criminal named Vincent (Melvil Poupaud). Sam turns out to be the moniker of Audrey's in a Second Life-style online game called Black Hole, this digital arena being where she encountered and interacted with Dragon. Pitching himself into Black Hole under the pseudonym of Gordon, Gaspard tracks Sam down to Heaven, an exclusive nightclub within the game. From this point, his involvement with Audrey/Sam, his preoccupation with her attempt to take her own life, and his shadow online existence all serve to drive a monumental wedge between him and Marion.

Black Heaven happens to be the second online teen thriller I have caught at Cannes 2010, following hot on the heels of Hideo Nakata's Chatroom, which screened as part of Un Certain Regard. And this French production covers much of the same ground to its British Cannes contemporary. Again the tabloid spectre of vulnerable young people being coaxed into suicide by acquaintances made over the web is a key component of the story – though in both movies this element feels more like an expression of an older generation's fears about what kids are leaving themselves open to on the big, bad internet, rather than being something that necessarily preoccupies your average web-head. The two pictures also have a commonality in that they – admittedly to varying degrees - touch upon the notion that identity and verification of identity become very porous matters when you are talking to someone via a computer.

As directed by Gilles Marchand (co-writer of 2005 Cannes competitor Lemming, whose director Dominik Moll worked with Marchand on the script for this new film), Black Heaven is stylistically neater than Chatroom, being less concerned with replicating teenage lexicon and more interested in fashioning its own gripping scenario. The sequences of Marchand's film set within the game of Black Hole are nicely atmospheric, this digital realm – in contrast to the film's sun-kissed real-world locations – being a wintery, nocturnal megalopolis, rendered in CG animation akin to that seen in the excellent French future noir Renaissance (the same animation firm apparently worked on both). The in-game avatars come in all shapes and sizes, from the woman who removes her masquerade eyepiece to reveal a bat-shaped void where her orbs should be, to the man whose face appears to have completely caved in on itself. It's a strange place, to say the least. Further heightening augmenting this aspect of the movie is the repetitiously addictive Black Hole theme tune fashioned by musician Anthony Gonzalez, better known as M83.

Although the online plotline suggests a thoroughly modern thriller, Marchand actually seems largely in thrall to movies from decades gone by. The protagonist being drawn into the world of a fractured, beautiful blonde when he saves her from suicide is a very obvious nod to Hitchcock's Vertigo, a film which does not exactly want for cinematic homages. And the famed shadow of that man Hitch looms large in Black Heaven's finale, when Marchand attempts to unleash a spate of stunning story surprises. Disappointingly, the nonsensical nature of these twists ensure they are of variety more biscuit-taking than breathtaking.

Rating on a scale of 5 trips to Mr. Bricolage on a first date: 3

Release date: TBC
Directed by: Gilles Marchand
Written by: Gilles Marchand, Dominik Moll
Cast: Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet, Louise Bourgoin, Pauline Etienne, Melvil Poupaud
Rating: TBC
Running time: 100 minutes