The Lost Patient film review: French thriller delves into labyrinths of a disturbed mind

Language: French with English audio and subtitle options

Cast: Txomin Vergez, Clotilde Hesme, Rebecca Williams, Audrey Dana, Alex Lawther, Stephane Rideau

Director: Christophe Charrier

The Lost Patient is a psychological thriller based on Timothe Le Boucher’s French comicbook Le Patient, which is also the film’s original title. The film is unlike most mainstream cinematic attempts that adapt comicbooks or graphic novels because the suspense drama in the story is built around the thought process of its central character, who strives to remember his past in order to figure out his present.

In an era when the thriller as a mainstream genre has broadly come to be defined by the sleek Hollywood formula package of suspense, stunts and spectacular VFX, a story centred on what plays out in the protagonist’s mind creates scope for intrigue. Which in turn gives The Lost Patient a certain advantage because, thematically at least, it gives the film a novelty factor, especially for those who love their thrillers served with a twist of the unusual.

This is the story of Thomas Grimaud (Txomin Vergez), a 19-year-old who wakes up in a hospital after lying in a state of coma for three years. Getting back to regular life is tough. He can’t recall what happened before the incident that left him in his current state and he cannot move because his muscles have become weak owing to inactivity. He has frequent panic attacks, with visions of a “hooded monster” who stalks him and tries to kill him. The hospital’s psychologist, Anna Kieffer (Clotilde Hesme), triesto help Thomas recall what might have happened to him. She informs him his parents and cousin died in an attack on the fateful night when Thomas was gravely injured, with a deep knife wound in his stomach.He talks of his sister Laura (Rebecca Williams ), but she has been missing since the incident.

The mystery story takes off when, guided by Anna’s revelations, Thomas gets down to reconstructingwhat might have happened. The process is not easy, and as he delves into the labyrinths of his mind in a bid to string together incoherent thoughts, disturbing flashes of the past start coming back to him. Thomas begins to sense there is more to his past than he seems to know. However, not in a condition to move around and disturbed by his visions, Thomas feels the threat to his life may not be over yet.

Director Christophe Charrier and co-writer Elodie Namer have written the screenplay in a way that most of what we see on screen unfolds through Thomas’gaze. At the same time, these visionsare mixed with his immediate reality. The approach creates scope for a slow burn build-up to the suspense, teasing the viewerby gradually throwing vital prop characters into the storyline as the film moves ahead. The flipside is the style of narration makes it difficult at times to segregate the illusory from the actual. The screenwriter duo has nonetheless interpreted a set of complicated characters from Le Boucher’s book.To their credit they get into the mystery drama right from scene one and justify every moment in the film’s runtime of around 90 minutes.

The world of The Lost Patient is a sombre one, soaked in understated unease — the sort that would easily suck you in if you dig comicbooks with dark themes. At the same time, the story seems like it was always meant for cinema. It is centred on the kind of sociopathy that popular cinema loves. Charrier mixes the grim tones of the mystery with set pieces familiar to the psychological thriller as a commercial genre. He lets the suspense about Thomas’ imagination and reality linger right till the end and then settles for an open-ended finale, leaving the audience to draw their conclusions. Despite the lack of physical action, Charrier’s storytelling is fast paced enough. There is a whiff of the classic old-school mystery movie about The Lost Patient, particularly in the way the twists are introduced with a quiet menace. The storytelling banks heavily on atmospherics to drum up the right eerie edge all through the runtime.

Charrier loves to play with timelines while setting up a mystery and its resolution. In his 2018 gay romance mystery titled Jonas, the filmmaker used two separate timelines —one where events take place in 1997 and the other in 2015 — to explore contrasting phases of his titular hero as a lover. The first captures his thrill of an innocent high-school romance while the second portrays him as a man tormented by his past. In The Lost Patient, too, Charrier uses two phases of Thomas’ life — pre and post-coma — to explore two states of his mind, although in a different way and in an entirely different story set-up. Only, Thomas’ story would seem to be a lot darker than that of Jonas.

Technically, the frames bring alive the right feel of an unsettling tale that regales. Pierre Baboin’s cinematography almost acts as a silent witness to the mystery as it unfolds, witnessing every detail of Thomas’ reality and visions. Film editor Stephanie Dumesnil maintains overall consistency despite the complicated process of blending the protagonist’s dreams and reality.

The film broadly rests on Txomin Vergez’s Thomas but the screenplay allots due importance to every character. The focus of screenwriting here is to primarily set up a mystery but the makers ultimately banks on human relationship drama to find a plot. The idea gives the protagonists an emotional edge beyond merely being players of a set-piece thriller. While on set-pieces, without giving away spoilers, you could spot the odd plot loophole or two, especially in a couple of sequences where twists in the suspense appear too convenient. Overall, though, the film is watchable for the way it creates a different kind of thriller using comicbook vibes.

Rating: 3 (out of 5 stars)

Vinayak Chakravorty is a critic, columnist and film journalist based in Delhi-NCR.

Read all the Latest News, Trending News, Cricket News, Bollywood News,
India News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.