The Blue Room (2014) (2024)

Popular reviews

• Review by Mike D'Angelo ★★★

  59/100

  Strange case: I concur with most of my peers/friends that the film is underwhelming, but for completely different reasons. Scott Tobias, for example, echoing many others, complains that "where the masters of suspense, like Hitchcock or Roman Polanski, can give such confines a delirious hothouse tension, Amalric’s direction is more pedestrian and flat, relieved mostly by a trio of great performances (including his own) and the satisfying noir mechanics of Simenon’s story." Whereas I found the performances mostly pedestrian, the mechanics of Simenon's story less than satisfying, and Amalric's formal control just short of stunning. Neither Wimbledon Stage nor On Tour suggested to me that he possesses a strong visual sense, but his efforts to mimic old-school classicism here…

• Review by Steph_h ★★★★

  Artsy murder mystery about a couple of cheaters and starting two cast members form my favorite series Les Bureau .. yeah I digged this.. the soundtrack was so amazing too, very modern but classically influenced .💙

• Review by hiruko ★★★½

  How did everything go so wrong? An illicit affair with deadly consequences is slowly pieced together via police interrogation. Captivating yet ostentatious in parts, making for a beautifully choppy movie that suffers somewhat because of it. Still worth a look, a good lazy evening hot coffee or tea kind of flick. The nightmare of meeting that wrong person is always a real threat.

• Review by ghostdinosaur ★★

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  A whodunit with no who and very little dunit. Opens like an ode to Resnais, exploring the oddity of memory -- the tiny details one remembers, the huge moments that give your life its supposed narrative that you forget. I'm making the Resnais thing up, by the way. I've only seen Hiroshima Mon Amour once, but it seems like the kind of person an ambitious French actor-turned-director would want to emulate. The more the film comes into focus, the more average and disappointing it seems. Only its play with chronology and sometimes unconventional cinematography separate it from an episode of Law & Order.

• Review by davidehrlich ★★★

  Amalric has a remarkable flair for color and composition, he's obviously picked up some tricks along the way... it allows him to use fragments and still lifes to ferment memories from individual details. if only the memories he were fermenting (note to self: "fermenting" is a tough word to pull off once, let alone twice) built to something more compelling. it's a terse 75 minute court drama about an affair, but the buildup and the resolution demand a more watchable middle.

• Review by MUBI US

  A puzzlebox neo-noir, this erotic thriller from Mathieu Amalric (turning 59 today!) is one where the French actor’s filmmaking is every bit as enthralling as his performance. We hand you the keys to The Blue Room, a spiral of passion, secrets & murder brilliantly adapted to the screen from Simenon’s eponymous novel.

  Now streaming.

• Review by Ari ★★★★

  It's nice that Amalric is trying to fill the void post-Chabrol's death - a smart existential thriller about infidelity and murder although his direction appears more influenced by Truffaut which is refreshing since Truffaut seems to have fallen off in terms of influence in the past decade or so (or is that just my impression?). With its gorgeous cinematography (and bonus points for visually quoting Courbet's L’Origine du Monde), the film dislocates space in a way that keeps viewers nicely at a distance from what is happening through few establishing shots, jarring cuts, and obstructed framing. It's a modest film with a brief running time but packs a punch.

• Review by Thomas ★★½

  “The Blue Room”, directed by and starring Mathieu Amalric, is an erotic mystery thriller that is pretty unremarkable except for its fragmented, nonlinear timeline. It´s decently made and decently performed but it´s too lifeless and generic to leave a strong impression. At least it´s short.

• Review by Graham Williamson ★★★½

  Georges Simenon is one of those interesting crime authors, like Ruth Rendell, whose novels make equally good fodder for Sunday night ITV and serious European auteur cinema. This is one of the latter, directed by and starring Mathieu Amalric. Amalric is obviously better known these days as an actor, and a good one at that, but one of his earliest breaks was as an assistant director on Louis Malle's extraordinary Au revoir les enfants. He really knows what he's doing with his camera, and he makes light work of this film's complex, time-hopping structure.

  It never became, for me, gripping in the way I suspect the original novel must be, but it has its own languorous quality. This is partly…

• Review by Christof ★★★★½

  The film begins with a couple having an intimate encounter in a hotel room, and we sense right away that this must be an affair they are hiding from a spouse or two. Next we see a police interrogation of the man, as he begins recounting this affair. It's clear he is a suspect in something serious, but the film doesn't reveal immediately what the details of the crime are that he is accused of. From that point on, the film unfolds in two parallel timelines, as we see how the affair develops, while we get context and narration from several scenes in which he he is interrogated by a policeman and by a judge, often intercut in a way…

• Review by Rachel ★★★½

  Film de détails - une sensualité souple et brute. Un cadrage serré, qui étouffe le personnage. Les yeux sombres et intriguants de Mathieu Amalric, qui sont doubles ici - acteur et réalisateur. Et sa femme dans la vie, Stéphanie Cléau, grande et belle. Un mystère dense.

• Review by ingrid ★★★½

  life is not the same while you're living it as when you look back on it
  
  

  
  the narrative needs some work, but i enjoyed it more this time around