Parky At the Pictures (3/4/2026)

(Reviews of Kim Novak's Vertigo; McCartney: The Hunt For the Lost Bass; D Is For Distance; Two Women; and Empire of Lies)

KIM NOVAK'S VERTIGO.

It's not often that a ghost is thanked in a film's credits. But the closing crawl of Alexandre O. Philippe's Kim Novak's Vertigo makes it clear that the spirit of Alfred Hitchcock was `undeniably present during the making of this movie'. This is the latest of the Swiss American documentarist's screen studies, following the likes of Earthlings: Ugly Bags of Mostly Water (2004; about Klingon), The People vs George Lucas (2010), Doc of the Dead (2014), Memory: The Origins of Alien (2019), Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on The Exorcist (2020), The Taking (2021; about Monument Valley), Lynch/Oz (2022), William Shatner: You Can Call Me Bill (2023), and Chain Reactions (2024). It's also the second to touch on the Master of Suspense after 78/52 (2017) took a forensice look at the shower scene in Psycho (1960).

Following what looks like a screen test of Kim Novak opening her eyes and looking towards the camera, we get a sequence of roving shots of her ranch near Eagle Point, Oregon. On the soundtrack, she confides, `I hesitate to even be recording this because I don't know what's gonna come out of what I say, what I mean. What do I mean? Is that what it's about: What do I mean? What do I think? What do I feel? I don't know what's expected of me to feel, or to think, or even to be, for that matter.'

Musing that it's not easy to grow old, the 92 year-old says she feels she's coming towards the end and thinks the time is right to reveal something that has been hidden in the closet of her mind. She remembers not knowing how to feel on discovering that her father, Joseph, kept the foetus of her miscarried younger brother in a jar in his basement workshop. Her mother, Blanche, had tried to abort her with knitting needles and later attempted to suffocate her with a pillow. But she survived and there's a sense of pride in her voice, as she sits at her easel painting one of the many spiral shapes that will recur throughout the film in recognition of their significance to Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958).

She puts her fixation with swirls down to the Easter eggs her strict father had painted for Marilyn (as she was christened) and her sister, Arlene, when they were kids. Novak feels an affinity to Alexandre O. Philippe and is amused when he reveals that he was drawn into cinema because the red wallpaper in Ernie's restaurant in Vertigo resembled the pattern in the family home in Switzerland. Novak teases that he noticed the décor more than her green-and-black satin dress, but he reassures her that it was the combination that alerted him to the power of visual imagery.

While she was never sure her father was proud of her, Novak knew her mother supported her and reminded her to always be the captain of her own ship. She was also very close to her grandmother, who has a bluebird tattoo on her arm and she taught Novak always to have the courage to do what she wanted to do and to speak when things needed saying. Monochrome clips from The Notorious Landlady (1962), The Legend of Lylah Clare (1968), and Jeanne Eagels (1957) decorate this section, which explains the influence that women had in shaping Novak's personality and worldview, which would rub up against the egotistical misogyny of the tyrants who ran the Hollywood studios, including Columbia's Harry Cohn.

Novak notes that her grandmother often appears in her paintings, as a butterfly or bird, and she recalls how a wounded bird that had been healed by vet husband Robert Malloy had fallen in love with her and followed her everywhere. Greta Garbo also reminded Novak of her grandmother and we clips from Grand Hotel (1931), Mata Hari (1932), Queen Christina (1933), and Anna Karenina (1935), as Novak ponders the fact that both she and Garbo exhibited a certain vulnerability on screen and that she would justify her decision to walk away from Hollywood by claiming to be following her idol's example.

While discussing the pleasure of coming home to warm. fuzzy slippers, Novak compares Vertigo co-star James Stewart to comfortable footwear. As we see him in It's a Wonderful Life (1946), Novak confides that, on thes set of Bell, Book and Candle (1958), they would often sit with their toes touching. This sets her reminiscing about seeing Garbo in Paris, her first trip abroad, and how she started modelling (with refrigerators looming large in her early legend). During a trip to Hollywood, she was spotted and cast as a model on a staircase in The French Line. Richard Quine played a key role in her early days in film and she admits to having fallen in love with him. But she resisted being turned into another Marilyn Monroe after debuting opposite Fred MacMurray in Pushover (both 1954) and playing Jeanne Eagels helped her to understand the way the system worked and what she needed to do to prevent herself being overwhelmed like Monroe. However, what she feared most was becoming Kim Novak, as she was a construct not her real self.

Over trailers drooling over Novak's looks and allure, she explains that it was bewildering becoming a star and being in demand with the media because it was all so alien to her. She compares the way the studio made her over to Madeleine and Judy in Vertigo and she agrees that Columbia boss Harry Cohn was a controlling influence and she put up with it in Phffft (1954),Picnic (1955). Pal Joey (1957), and Middle of the Night (1959) because she had little choice. But director Joshua Logan recognised that she felt being pretty was like wearing a crown of thorns, while she disliked having to play characters who had nothnig to do with herself. She also felt uncomfortable being presented as glamorous to be gazed upon and, over clips from 5 Against the House, The Man With the Golden Arm (both 1955), Bell, Book and Candle (1958), Of Human Bondage, Kiss Me, Stupid (both 1964), The Amorous Adventures of Moll Flanders (1965), and Lylah Clare, Novak laments that she kept wanting to escape and turn her back on the circus.

While others in the 1950s made much of acting, Novak specialised in `reacting', as this was her way of being authentic and not laying it on too thick, as so many contemporaries did. She also used to do sketches of her characters before she did big scenes, so they became part of her core. So, art helped keep her grounded during what she always felt was merely going to be a detour into movies.

She returns to the house perched on a cliff between Carmel and Big Sur to remember the sense of being reborn and free to paint and be alone with Warlock the Great Dane, an unnamed goat, and Pyewacket the cat. Archive footage shows them around the house, as Novak notes that she started painting in earnest here. Birds occur a lot in her art, as she sees them as messengers and their appearance lets her know she's heading in the right direction. Many canvases were lost in a house fire and she regrets the loss because each piece (including one of her father) was so personal. The script for Vertigo survived two blazes and she opens in on camera and remembers Cohn had told her it was rubbish. Yet it spoke to her as she read it and realised that she and Judy had much in common. The screen splits to show clips of Judy and Scottie and Novak reliving the scene in breathy whispers. The effect is used again, as Novak and Philippe go into the attic and find the Edith Head grey suit that transforms Judy into Madeleine and she holds it to herself, as she remembers the feeling of playing the scene under Hitchcock's direction and Stewart's anguished gaze.

Novak didn't know she was bipolar at the time and she confides that it's a wonder her brain didn't explode from the psychological strain of being herself in such a prestigious film and having to play Judy and Madeleine with a touch of Carlotta. She identified with Judy because she wanted Scottie to look at her the way he had looked at Madeleine and Novak always wanted to be herself rather than a studio possession. Recalling the intensity of her rapport with Stewart, she commends his gentleness and respect and insists they were never acting. Instead they were reacting in character to the situations they were trapped in and that made their performances all the more potent and persuasive.

Hugging the grey suit, she dabs tears on to the fabric and inhales to see if she can smell her old self. She's intrigued by how much softer it feels, as she expresses her gratitude to the suit for playing such a key role in her life. Sighing, she also opines that one of the good things about ageing is that you can look back and see how beautiful everything is. Accepting that she didn't do a bad job with her reacting, Novak thanks Philippe for giving her the chance to appreciate her achievements and come to some sort of peace with them. She reminds him to look into the sky after she's gone because she will keep painting and any spirals he sees in the clouds will be her way of keeping in touch.

It's very moving to hear someone of Novak's age retaining energy and optimism, while also coming to terms with once-troubling aspects of the past. For that reason alone, this is an engrossing of a woman who just happens to have been a legendary film star. Some of Novak's utterances are a little precious, but she's entitled to express herself in any way she wishes, especially considering how courageous she is being in revisiting the struggles she had endured while acclimatising to the rare atmosphere in 1950s Hollywood, where the sense of an era ending must have hung heavy, as the stars and directors who had dominated since the early talkie days started moving on - many into television, which had decimated cinema attendances and driven the studios into the financial crisis that would culminate in them all becoming part of multi-media concerns who were more interested in profit than art.

Philippe and editor David Lawrence pack in the clips, even finding room for Delbert Mann's 1973 teleplay, The Girl From the Left. But they're too often used for illustration not illumination or because a line of dialogue echoes something that Novak has just said. He largely leaves her the floor, when a little structural questioning might have sharpened her focus. But one gets the impression that the awestruck director was so delighted to be in Novak's company and get such erudite revelations that he let her extemporise. Such an approach means that there's no mention of such potentially compelling topics as Hitchcock's behaviour on the set, misogyny within the studio system, and Novak's scandalous romance with Sammy Davis, Jr., which prompted Cohn (who called her `the fat Polack') to threats to cripple or blind the Black entertainer for besmirching his star. Similarly, there's nothing about Novak's unhappy returns in Just a Gigolo (1977) and Liebestraum (1991) and why she chose to come back when she did. Mercifully, however, we're spared Donald Trump's ungallant online remark about Novak's appearance (after a lengthy exile) at the 2014 Academy Awards. Twelve years on, she looks remarkable, but he remains irredeemably oafish.

Such topics were evidently not on the agenda, as this was never intended to be a standard biographical profile. But it might have been nice to hear Novak's views on what were pivotal aspects of her brief stay at the top. Much can be read between the lines Lylah Clare exchanges abusive director Lewis Zarkan (Peter Finch) in a Tinseltown satire that was essentially Robert Aldrich's companion piece to What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962). But, for all its intimacy, this feels like one of Philippe's minor studies, as it lacks the forensic intensity that made 78/52 so compelling.

McCARTNEY: THE HUNT FOR THE LOST BASS.

It's not been a bad year, filmwise, for Paul McCartney. Following the overdue release of David Litchfield's One Hand Clapping (1974), he oversaw the updating of The Beatles Anthology (1995) and put in a guest appearance in Rob Reiner's Spinal Tap II: The End Continues. Now, having been front and centre in Morgan Neville's Man on the Run (both 2025), Macca is a key contributor to Arthur Cary's McCartney: The Hunt For the Lost Bass, an Arena documentary that will come to BBC2 and iPlayer after a short run in cinemas.

Paul and Mike McCartney grew up at 20 Forthlin Road in the Allerton district of Liverpool and the latter returns what is now a National Trust property to recall a childhood that ended abruptly with the death of their nurse mother, Mary, in October 1956. In an effort to cheer the boys up, father Jim bought Mike a banjo and Paul a guitar. The left-hander quickly became proficient and he impressed the young John Lennon when the pair met at St Peter's Church in Woolton on 6 July 1957. Lennon's band, The Quarrymen, had been booked to perform at the village fete and newcomer McCartney quickly added skilled guitarist and fellow Liverpool Institute student, George Harrison, to the strength.

Just over three years later, The Beatles (as they were now known) went to Hamburg to play at the Indra Club in August 1960. When they moved on to the Kaiserkeller on the Reeperbahn, they met artist and bassist Klaus Voorman and his girlfriend, Astrid Kirchherr. She fell heavily for bass guitarist Stuart Sutcliffe, who was only in the group to please his best friend, and Lennon had no option but to let him go when he decided to focus on his art.

This left The Beatles without a bassist and Voorman confides that he had hopes that he would be asked to join them at the Top Ten Club. But it was decided that McCartney would join drummer Pete Best in the rhythm section and the 18 year-old marked the switch in the spring of 1961 by shelling out a hard-earned £30 (around £850 in today's money) at the Steinway Musikhau for a custom-made left-handed Höfner 500/1 violin bass. With its stacked pick-ups mounted near the heel of the neck. this was the instrument that McCartney played on such early hits as `Love Me Do', `Please, Please Me', `From Me to You', and `She Loves You'.

In 1963, however, he bought a second Höfner, with separated pick-ups and sent the 1961 model for a refurishment that included a new sunburst finish. The 500/1 pair would soon find themselves in competition with a Rickenbacker 4001S and the 1961 bass slipped from public view after it was glimpsed at Apple Corps's Savile Row offices during the shooting of Let It Be in January 1969.

Following the break-up of The Beatles, McCartney hit the road with his new combo, Wings, and the 1961 bass disappeared some time in 1972. Seemingly, he forgot all about it until May 2017, even though he had started using the 1963 version on stage after Elvis Costello had persuaded him to dust it down during the sessions for the Flowers in the Dirt album in early 1988. Indeed, many years passed before Macca invited fellow Scouser and Höfner's former electric guitar manager Nick Wass to his Sussex studio to ask if he had any idea what had happened to the missing instrument. There was much speculation about its whereabouts, with McCartney dismissing rumours of pawn shops in Las Vegas, a guitar store in Tokyo, and a private collection in Canada in favour of a fanciful belief that it was hanging on the wall of a Bavarian castle.

A lovely Voorman illustration sets that scene before Wass and partner Cathy Harrison explain that they set up the `Trace the Bass' website to ask for information about the 1961 Höfner. Around 50 responses were posted, but none contained concrete information, while his own researches only took him to its fleeting appearance in Let It Be. Help would soon prove to be at hand, however, as investigate reporters Scott and Naomi James stumbled across Wass's site while seeking information about the violin bass that McCartney had played at Glastonbury on 25 June 2022. They agreed to help Wass and the website was relaunched as `The Lost Bass' in September 2023.

Among the 600 or so messages was one from Ian Horne, who had been a roadie and sound manager with Wings in the early 1970s. Indeed, he and brother-in-law, Trevor Jones, would be invited to sing backing vocals on `No Words' during the Band on the Run sessions, even though their voices are well down in the mix. Curiously, they had been the last to see the 1961 Höfner, as they had loaded it into a van with an acoustic guitar and a couple of amplfiers at the end of a studio session in the autumn of 1972. Horne was staying with Jones in Lancaster Road in Notting Hill, but they had been forced to park the van on the corner of Cambridge Gardens. Returning next morning, they discovered that the bass and the other equipment had been stolen and they reported to theft to the police before informing McCartney at his home at 7 Cavendish Avenue in St John's Wood. Despite dreading his reaction, he simply shrugged and said he had another one. As he never mentioned this to Wass, it had clearly forgotten all about the episode, even though he had given an interview to a reporter at the gate door of his property.

Concluding that the theft had taken place on 10 October 1972, Scott and Jones proceeded to ask Horne about the Cambridge Gardens neighbourhood. He explained that there were several squats in the area, including one being used by the space rock band, Hawkwind. However, he was pretty sure that the robbery had not been committed to order, as there was a lot of poverty and addiction in the area and the thief was probably an opportunist who struck lucky.

Or did they? The Höfner 500/1 was one of the most iconic instruments in rock history and would not be easy to sell. Indeed, there was speculation that the thief had simply tossed the bass into a skip. But Wass and Scott and Jones refused to think the worst and returned to a message they had initially dismissed because a Buckinghamshire ambulance crew member had informed them that a patient had told him the Höfner had been hurled into the canal at the end of Ladbroke Grove. Even though Andy Dickinson professed to be a huge Beatles fan and even had his own bass guitar, his story about a confessional patient sounded far fetched. But Scott and Jones were intrigued by the mention of Cambridge Gardens and, after Dickinson kept badgering him for the full story, co-worker Steve Glenister agreed to tell all.

He and his younger brother had grown up with parents, George and Linda Glenister, at 100 Cambridge Gardens. Money was often tight, as George (who was a talented amateur footballer) worked as a lorry loader at Paddington Station. So, he had spotted the van when it parked outside the house and had taken his chances in the hope of making a few extra quid. On discovering the bass was too readily recognisable, George gave it to Ron Guest, the landlord of The Admirable Blake on Ladbroke Grove, in return for a few pints.

The Glenisters had moved to Buckinghamshire when he was still a boy and George had told him about the bass in two confessions several years apart. Not wishing to besmirch his father's reputation (even though he had never told his son that he loved him), Steve had made up the canal story in order to bury a guilty family secret by putting Dickinson off the trail. But Naomi Scott was closing in on the grail and she contacted members of the Guest family to see if they knew what had happened to the guitar (which was still in its original carrying case) after Ron had given it to his 17 year-old son, Graham. Sadly, he had been killed in a motor sport accident and the bass had returned to his father. He had given it to his daughter for a birthday present, only for her to turn it down because she had wanted a keyboard.

Seemingly, it had remained in the attic until Ron died in 1992 and it had passed to his second son, Haydn. He had married a woman named Cathy and moved from Birmingham to Hastings via Ealing, together with his various guitars. Among them was the Höfner 500/1 and Cathy hadn't known what to do with it when her husband had died during the Covid pandemic. Struck by the shape of the instrument, she had run a photograph through Google Images and realised that it belonged to McCartney, who lived about 12 miles away at Blossom Wood Farm near Peasmarsh. He was in the United States when she contacted him, but one of his team came to collect the bass on 21 September 2023. On being reunited with it on screen, he had said, `Welcome home, honey.'

Although he had contacted Wass to tell him the good news, McCartney had asked him to keep it under his hat for a little longer. However, Cathy's son, Ruaidhri Guest, couldn't resist posting on X on 13 February 2024: `To my friends and family I inherited this item which has been returned to Paul McCartney. Share the news.'

Macca acknowledged the tweet two days later and thanked all involved for their efforts. At the end of the film, he runs his fingers up the fretboard with effortless ease for an 83 year old. His nonchalance, however, suggests the scene was staged for Cary's camera after the event and this element of stiffness rather characterises a film that never quite achieves the rhythm of a McCartney bassline.

It's to be expected that so many contributors seem a little self-conscious on camera, as they're not celebrities. But Macca himself often comes across somewhat stiffly, most notably in leaving Klaus Voorman a phone message. Yet, moments like Dickinson's bass breaking down and needing repair, add to the film's charm, it's much more a television programme than a piece of cinema and it's hard to see what could be gained from seeing it on the big screen.

While Cary and co-writers Scott and Jones structure and pace the detective story capably, the denouement feels a bit muddled and appears to leave a few loose ends untied. Given that he doesn't blame George Glenister for a bit of petty thievery when his back was to the wall - as he reveals after admitting to the odd bit of knockin' off in his youth, `We got out of that pretty quickly, luckily. The Beatles took over and we found an honest profession. But I can sympathise with people who don't have that kind of luck.' - it also seems odd for McCartney not to meet Steve Glenister or Cathy Guest, if only to express his gratitude and achieve a sense of closure. The latter works part-time in a launderette, but has refused to disclose what happened with McCartney after she had revealed she found it hard to make ends meet. It's not for us to know whether a gratuity was offered, but the blurriness concludes matters on something of a downbeat, when footage of McCartney and his 1961 violin Höfner rocking together on `Get Back' at the O2 Arena on 19 December 2025 (with Wass, Scott, and Jones in the audience with complimentary tickets) would have underscored the sense of a happy ending.

D IS FOR DISTANCE.

Parenthood was one of the themes of Chris Petit's Content (2010), a self-described `21st-century road movie, ambient' that also riffed on ageing, terrorism, and new media. Fifteen years have since elapsed and being a father has taken up much of Petit's time, as his son has required extensive care after his childhood memories were erased during a series of seizures. In D Is For Distance, Petit and parner Emma Matthews reflect on the family's recent experiences, while questioning existing NHS practices and ruminating on memory and the moving image.

As a narrator (Jodhi May) explains, Louis started having epileptic fits when he was 12. The prescribed medication left him unable to engage with his mother, Emma, in simple conversations, while he lost his childhood memories. He had also been investigated for Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, in which things seem simultaneously close and distant. However, two separate doctors insisted the conditions Louis was supposedly experiencing didn't occur together and they told Emma to stop putting ideas into her impressionable son's head. By the time it was found they were wrong, damage had been done and the narrator states that Emma blamed a mix of `hubris and bureaucracy'. She also discovered that a seizure that lasts more than five minutes is called `status epilepticus' and is extremely dangerous. Louis has had 12 such episodes and watching helplessly was unbearably stressful.

The next change of medication induced one-minute seizures every 40 minutes and, after two years of negative progress, the doctors apparently told Emma to grieve for the child who once was. Petit denounced them for being more interesting in prescribing than caring and applied for an Irish passport, which was apt, as his grandfather had run an asylum in Sligo. At her 100th birthday party, Petit's mother named everyone in a 1947 wedding photo except her groom and he had pondered the value of what is lost if it can't be remembered.

Througout the film to this point. we have cut away regularly to follow Louis and his father on a trip to Finland in order to scout locations for a film that might well never get made, about the connection between Beat author William Burroughs and postwar CIA chief. James Jesus Angleton, who we are told is one of the most secretive men who ever lived. On the journey, Louis is seen playing the guitar and reading and it's at this point in the film that he speaks for himself to reveal that his doctors had all-but given up hope when his parents had taken the decision to take him to the Netherlands to try medicinal cannabis. This had an instant impact by stopping the seizures, but access was denied via the NHS and obtaining the drug was expensive and risky.

Diverting away from Louis, we hear about Angleton and his downfall in 1974. The narrator suggests he really knew what happened with Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas in 1963 and backed LSD experiments to examine the effectiveness of mind-controlling drugs. The inclusion of a photo of John Wayne on a Filipino military base with Oswald standing in the background is amusingly mischievous, indeed much more so than the passage of Burroughs explaining how he sought to tamper with the realm of pre-recording through his experiments with randomly assembling parts of cut-up pages (a technique also used by David Bowie, whose photograph is briefly shown because it made such an impact on Louis in 2016).

The narrator describes the effects Louis endured while withdrawing from prescribed drugs and she notes the importance of his art to keeping him grounded while he was having disturbing hallucinations. As the daughter of an NHS doctor, Emma is disappointed by the refusal to give Louis the cannabis that has clearly helped him and Petit seemingly put it down to a conspiracy led by the pharmaceutical industry that was well known to be in `a lethal addictive business'. As he spouts about the world being made a mess by social media before A.I. comes along to complete the job, we see footage of Louis in his early twenties making the most of his days that are still bereft of memories, even though the seizures have stopped. The closing images show father and son tramping over rough terrain beside a spectacular lake in Lapland. It's an aptly calm and poetic way to end, even though it offers no guarantees for either Louis's future or that of a human population that keeps ignoring the writing on the wall in front of its face. (According to Chris Petit, anyway).

He wrote the text for this deeply personal insight into an ordeal that the family has faced together with great courage and a tenderness that comes through a collaged testament that is deftly studded with clips from the earliest days of the moving image - by the likes of Louis Le Prince, Eadweard Muybridge, the Lumière brothers, Georges Méliès, Percy Stow and Cecil Hepworth, Segundo de Chomón, J. Searle Dawley, and W.W. Young, whose 1915 take on Alice in Wonderland pops up frequently - as well as some splendid monochrome cartoons featuring the likes of Betty Boop. The inclusion of Matthias Grünewald and Nikolaus Hagenauer's `Isenheim Altarpiece' is also welcome, as are the references to John Ford's The Searchers (1956) and Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo (1959). Yet, such is the intimate nature of the subject matter that it feels overly intrusive to say more, other than to wish all three well.

TWO WOMEN.

Claude Fournier's 1970 Québec cult hit, Deux femmes en or, receives a makeover in Chloé Robichaud's Two Women, which comes hottish on the heels of Monia Chokri's César-winning same-sex comedy, The Nature of Love (2023). In fact, this is less a remake than a screen adaptation of the play that Catherine Léger had based on Fournier's dated, but once button-pushing satire on pornography and the feminist gaze.

Convinced that the corvine cries she can hear through the wall of her Montréal condo apartment are those of an auditoriy exhibitionist, new mother Violette (Laurence Leboeuf) confronts Florence (Karine Gonthier-Hyndman) about her noisome orgasms. Florence is baffled, however, because she hasn't had relations with partner David (Mani Soleymanlou) in years. Actually, Violette makes a similar sound herself when she has sex with husband, Benoît (Félix Moati), a pharmaceutical salesman who returns having just had a fling with his co-worker, Éli (Juliette Gariépy), at a convention.

Florence and David have a 10 year-old son, Max (Mateo Laurent Menbreño Daigle), who has named the hamster who ate her babies after his mother. But they have little else in common and David is dismayed when Florence announces that she is going to stop taking the antidepressants that he's relieved she uses because she has been pretty wild in the past. Fresh from ogling Sébastien (Jean-Sébastien Girard), the Exterminating Angels man Violette had called to search for crows, Florence flashes a man in a cherry-picker changing the bulb in a lamppost. When she informs David that her libido is returning, he reveals that he's losing his, as he has started taking her pills because he believes their relationship works better when one of them is on antidepressants.

David's mood hardly improves when his plans for a communal greenhouse are knocked back at a condo meeting. Benoît is also upset because Éli noticed that Violette had posted a #MeToo message on her Facebook page and, when he confronts her about it, she reveals that she was pressured into sex at 18 with her boss at a McDonald's and admits that she dislikes being coaxed into giving him blow jobs. Meanwhile, Florence has joined a dating app in order to satisfy her urges, but she settles for dry humping the cable guy when he comes to drill a hole in her bedroom wall. By contrast, Violette feels sad and isolated and Florence whisks her off to a bar, only for her to cut her wrist in demonstrating that killing oneself is much harder to do in real life than in movies. David misreads this as a cry for help and hides all the blades in the flat, while Violette feels lonelier than ever after baby Emma has her first day at a nursery.

Shortly after Florence has sex with a female window cleaner, Violette borrows hamster dropping as an excuse to re-summon Sébastien and he is so turned on by her impersonation of the cawing crow that they have vigorous sex on her bed. She's also soon flirting with William (Patrick Abellard) when he comes to fix the bathroom, while Florence gets busy with an educated worker who likes the fact she's a translator. A plumber is the next to succumb to Florence, whose moans are heard by neighbour Jessica (Sophie Nélisse), who has developed a crush on David while working on the greenhouse project, along with Pénélope (Isabelle Brouillette), who suspects people are behaving very oddly.

Put out when Eli informs him that she wouldn't want a relationship with him if he left Violette, Benoît gets suspicious when they bump into Sébastien in a bar and he gives Violette his card in case she needs a follow-up appointment. Florence also has an awkward moment, when the man who comes to buy a drill she's selling online chides her for having an unbuttoned sweater and they get into an argument about men's double standards when it comes to women seeking to express themselves sexually.

Violette and Benoît have nice sex after she tells him that monogamy is a concept invented by men to keep control over women. But they argue when he discovers she's sold his fishing gear online and was planning to sell the guitar he rarely plays. He shows David that he can strum competently enough, as they get drunk together in the greenhouse after David and Florence have a row over the hamster and Max lets slip that he doesn't think Florence likes being his mother. David goes to an ice hockey game with Benoît, who annoys Éli by letting him sit between them. However, she warms to David and teases her lover when he mentions that Florence had asked for their relationship to become non-exclusive and how she had even made some more cash for them by selling stuff on Kijiji, which was the site Violette had chosen to flog his guitar.

As he's been drinking on top of the pills, David collapses after Éli kisses him (she says she has a thing for ugly men) and he collapses. Florence and Violette rush to the hospital, where the former is surprised when Éli mentions their open relationship and the latter twigs her husband has been unfaithful. After a long night, both couples agree to treat each other with more respect. However, Florence decides to move out and her eyes twinkle at the sight of her hunky taxi driver, as Violette waves her goodbye and two cawing birds fly off from their perch.

Despite the best efforts of Karine Gonthier-Hyndman, this treatise on female desire never really catches light. The characters are sketchy, with neither having passions or career goals, while their mental health issues are simply a source of unfunny humour. Similarly, the hook-ups are as convincing as the cornball meets in a porn movie, albeit (mercifully) without the concomitant naked gyratings. But, while Gonthier-Hyndman gets to show off her comic timing in a couple of sequences (most notably when she tries to duck down after flashing the lightbulb man), Laurence Leboeuf has to be content with a bit of cawing and a lot of sad-eyed contemplation.

But her marriage is so archly presented that it disrupts the rhythm of the story, as do the cutaways to Benoît's couplings (even though Juliette Gariépy's goth-browed Éli is far more progressive, proactive, and provocative than either Violette or Florence) and David's greenhouse project, which seeks easy laughs from communal meetings in which the chief heckler is a cipher who plays no other part in proceedings. The same is also true of the more supportive Pénélope and Jessica, although they are nicer to David than Florence, who feels there's nothing odd about her son naming the pet hamster that ate her own babies after her.

Mani Soleymanlou does what he can to make David seem amiable, but the joke about the anti-depressants is as mehish as the name of the pest control company, which is clearly a reference to Claude Brisseau's Les Anges exterminateurs (2006), which was inspired by a pre-#MeToo moment involving the French director and three auditioning actresses. The discussion that follows between Violette and Benoît about a movement that has never been entirely accepted in the French-speaking world feels schematic and sounds more like something two characters in a play would say to each other than a husband and wife. The same goes for the doorstep contretemps about the male and female gaze between Florence and the man who has come to buy the drill she has sold on Kijiji. Félix Moati rather goes through the roguish motions and there's little conviction in the smarmy Benoît's busted protestation that he doesn't want to lose Violette. Even the sign-off gag about Florence and the cabby falls flat. Moreover, it underlines how rushed and glib the denouements are.

Beside showing how confined the female neighbouts are and lingering in close-up on the odd body part, Sara Mishara's 35mm camera has little to do during the dialogue sequences, which are crisply edited by Matthieu Bouchard. But her views of the nocturnal Montréal skyline are effective. as is Philippe Brault's score. It might have been interesting to release this in the UK as part of a double bill with the Fournier original. But Robichaud and Léger's wit-free update pales so patently that it was probably wise to let it fly solo.

EMPIRE OF LIES.

Director Matthew Hope started out in the middle of the countryside in his 2005 short, In the Field. Now, after directing three features - The Vanguard (2008), The Veteran (2011), and All the Devil's Men (2018) - he's back in the wide-open spaces in Empire of Lies. While his earlier outings had adhered to the basic action thriller format, this two-hander actually demonstrates more ambition and it's a shame that some scripting issues and a clumsy conclusion undermine the solid efforts of the actors.

Twitchy and watchful, Dave Harris (Joseph Millson) has parked his camper van with a hedge behind him and a wide view of a Gloucestershire field stretching out before him. Storing a gun in a cupboard, he goes to collect the bread and milk that have been left for him in a canvas bag hung over a gatepost. Clearly in distress, he tears up while watching some horses grazing and can't bring himself to look inside a tin filled with keepsakes. Going for a walk, he eyes a tree branch with a few to slinging a noose over it. But he's far more disturbed when he sees a figure strolling across the field towards the camper.

Claiming to be a reporter from the YouTube political channel, Impact, she (Natalie Spence) explains that she hails from the same town as Dave and attended the same school as his daughter. Despite his refusal to allow her to reveal her name. the twentysomething insists that she only wants him to do a piece to camera to counter claims that he had got away with murdering his daughter.

Calling from inside the van, Dave orders the woman to leave him alone, as he knows that everything he says will get twisted and used against him. She promises that she only wants him to be a voice for his daughter, as her voice was drowned out during the trial for her murder. When he bursts through to door to confront her, she accuses him of trying to intimidate her and he is appalled that she could ever think he would threaten a young woman on her own. She turns huffily and marches away, but thinks better of retreating and strides back to repeat the police theory that he killed his daughter to get back at his ex-wife. Snorting sceptically, Dave asks why he would have waited 27 years to exact such demented revenge. He then inquires how the YouTuber found him and she reveals that he had mentioned a farmer friend in his testimony and she had tracked him down to find that John O'Brien was not only giving him somewhere to hide, but also keeping him supplied with provisions.

In a bid to reassure Dave, the stranger tries to introduce herself. Again, he stops her from revealing her name and snatches away her phone so she can't film him. But he allows her to use a mini voice recorder and she explains that she had become interested in politics after her father, who had a few wild ideas, had prevented her from going to university. Butting in, Dave declares her spiel too slick to be credible and accuses her of trying to put him off his guard in some sort of psyop. When she asks what he's talking about, he goes into a long rant about conspiracy theories such as dinosaurs having never existed to reinforce his contention that people are sleepwalking into calamity because they have been manipulated into believing everything they're told. He claims that it's been this way since the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 put the wind up the establishment. But, before he can expound further, the visitor claims that he was angry at the time his daughter was killed because the social media posts outlining his views had been taken down.

Sensing she's caught him off guard, she also demands to know why Detective Inspector Conlan believes that he stabbed his daughter 22 times and faked a call from her phone to give himself an alibi. She also asks why he avoided being charged for lack of evidence, even though only his and her fingerprints and hair samples could be found at the murder scene. But Dave quickly counters by reminding her that she had been a climate change activist and that she had been silenced to stop her from revealing damning information. Undaunted, she recalls that his daughter's boyfriend, Tony Lacey, had an alibi for the night in question, when he didn't. Pushing home her advantage, the interloper also inquires why he has gone into hiding instead of striving to find his child's killer.

Leaving him to stew about failing in his quest for justice, the woman asks for a bathroom break and returns to ask if he admits having twice threatened to kill his daughter, once in Lacey's hearing. With Dave again on the defensive, she brings up his 20 year-old manslaughter conviction after having caught Ray Watkins in bed with his wife. He explains that he had only meant to punch him, but he had stumbled and hit his head. While he regrets taking a life, he is more wracked at missing five years of his two year-old daughter's childhood. Before he can dwell on his pain, however, the woman asks Dave why he thinks he was framed for his daughter's murder and he returns to the dinosaur conspiracy in suggesting that it's suspicious that no one had found any fossils or bones before the publication of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. He insists the whole dinosaur industry is part of a psyop to con people into believing in an organised plan that led them away from religious beliefs.

When she looks at her watch, he stops talking about God and intelligent design to ask why she used the word `station' when fretting about her YouTube colleagues getting impatient for her report. He claims the slip betrays the fact she's from the police and he walks away. She follows to the edge of some woods, where Dave suddenly becomes talkative and repeats his accusation that his daughter was assassinated to stop her from making a top secret disclosure. He also insists that she was exploited by the establishment, who made her a celebrity in order to keep her under control. Moreover, he continues, the fact she was funded by a political faction made her a target for their opponents.

Suddenly, Dave hears the sound of a vehicle and cowers in the undergrowth. Reassured that no one is snooping, he takes the YouTuber to the horse field and divulges that his daughter had loved watching the animals from afar. Keen to keep his mind focussed, the woman asks about the content of his social media posts and swears that they weren't crank theories, as the BBC had broadcast news that Building 7 had collapse on 9/11 before it actually did. He insists this confirms a joined-up global conspiracy and he laments the fact that his daughter's neo-Marxism blinded her to such evident truths. When she inquires what they had been arguing about on the night she died, he avers that he had been trying to deprogramme her because she had been brainwashed by the organisation she worked for, The Guardians of the Planet.

Losing his cool, as darkness falls, Dave starts to thrash around, and the woman waits until he has worn himself out before opining that the Guardians reckoned that his daughter followed in her father's footsteps and was a fantasist whose theories couldn't be backed up. They claim that father and daughter were heard rowing at their offices and that Dave accused her mother of having kept them apart. But she changes tack and asks what happens if he's right and they did kill her. After all, two attempts have been made on his life since a TV programme about the case and who is to say that they won't find his van and make it look as if he had hanged himself on a tree in remorse for murdering his own kin.

Feeling her trying to manipulate him, Dave produces the gun from inside the van and the woman blurts out that she believes his story and thinks the time is right for him to speak up for his daughter. When Dave admits the weapon is a toy, she threatens to play the recording of him attempting to frighten her unless she tells him why he thinks his daughter was killed. Instead, he laments that the establishment set him up as an easy target and let people think that he was a dangerous fanatic who could kill again. Sympathising, the stranger reveals that she had been asked to investigate the Guardians and now needs him to tell her the name of the military man who had ordered the execution of his daughter.

Dave howls that he just wants his baby back, but the YouTuber presses for the name so that she can ensure justice is done. Calling him `dad', she says she has always believed him from the dinosaur theory onwards and she pleads with him to get up and do his duty. Looking around, Dave sees that he's alone. Stumbling into the camper, he opens the tin box and takes out a snapshot of his daughter, who looks exactly like his visitor. Summoning his courage, he gets into the driver's seat and sets out to nail her killer.

Attention is required throughout this involved thriller, as just about every speech is laden with exposition. Unfortunately, this can sound quite stagy at times, despite the best efforts of Joseph Millson (who co-wrote the script with the director) and Natalie Spence. But what else can the characters do but talk in a place whose poor phone reception denies the chance to vary the visuals with the odd newspaper headline, TV bulletin clip, or social media post? Hope and Millson pack lots of ideas into the dialogue, but they never solve the problem of making the audience care about the fate of a young woman whose background, political views, and career activities are only ever couched in the vaguest of terms. Every aspect of her life is so nebulously presented that it's difficult to fathom what she stood for or why she has managed to ruffle so many feathers in high places.

Dave is no easier to empathise with, as his right-wing conspiracy theories may be eccentric, but they aren't exactly dangerously subversive or unspeakably offensive. He's well played by Millson, who ably conveys the guilt gnawing Dave and the paranoia that being hunted has induced. But he lacks parental desperation, let alone an avenger's anger. Spence also does well with a tricky role that requires her to be a threat, while also seeming to be the voice of reason and a guiding conscience. But the screenplay never solves the problem that her identity is blatantly obvious from the first mention of the murdered daughter and every attempt to complicate her backstory to make Dave believe she's a cop rather than a vlogger rings hollow.

This isn't Spence's fault, as she determinedly fixes the viewer's gaze in the numerous front-on close-ups that Hope uses to make us complicit in the wrongs of modern society. But the use of drone shots to show the van's vulnerability work less well and the same is true of Ryan Williams's score, which always seems to come in at the wrong moment and dissipate the intensity of the scene. If ever a film didn't need musical accompaniment it was this one and Hope should have made much more intrusive use of Rob Davidsson's sound design. Elliot Millson's cinematography and Emma Gaffney's editing are, by contrast, much fitter for purpose.

There's no denying that this is an ambitious bid to make an intimate, tense, and thought-provoking film. But surely it would heighten Dave's sense of entrapment if a couple of key scenes had taken place within the confines of the van. As it is, the characters only ever enter it separately and to little dramatic effect. Clearly, there was no chance of a third character intruding, as this would ruin the Sixth Sense conceit. But Dave is parked in such an exposed place that it seems like a wasted opportunity to not subject him to more outside threat, if only to make him jumpier and more vulnerable to the young woman's interrogation. So, while this is often frustrating, it often intrigues, even though the sudden revelation about the military man masterminding the whole dark scheme fails to convince and feels as though Hope and Millson had run out of obfuscatory options to spin the tale out a little further.