Black Box

Yann Gozlan's Boîte noire (released in English as Black Box) opened in 2021 and brought Pierre Niney two César nominations, for Best Actor and Best Original Screenplay (Niney co-wrote it with Gozlan and Simon Moutaïrou). It was one of the most successful French thrillers of its year, commercially and critically, and after Burn Out (2017) it confirmed Gozlan as a procedural-thriller director of unusual technical commitment.

Mathieu Vasseur (Niney) is a young technician at France's BEA aviation safety bureau, the agency that forensically analyses the cockpit voice recorders and flight data recorders recovered from civilian air disasters. He is unexpectedly put in charge of the black box from an Alpine airliner crash that has killed several hundred passengers. As his analysis deepens he starts to suspect, against the consensus of his colleagues, his agency and the airline, that the official conclusion is hiding something. André Dussollier plays his superior at the agency, and Lou de Laâge is his wife, an architect who works for the airline manufacturer.

The procedural detail is the film's real strength: actual BEA technical practice, real spectrographic analysis software on screen, and an unusually accurate picture of the aviation industry. That credibility carries it through the later turns of its plot, which few French thrillers manage. Niney, who began his Comédie-Française career at sixteen, holds the whole investigation together with exactly the nervous concentration the role asks for.