Black Box

Yann Gozlan's Boîte noire (released in English as Black Box) opened in 2021 and won Pierre Niney two César nominations — Best Actor and Best Original Screenplay (Niney being a co-writer alongside Gozlan and Simon Moutaïrou). The film became one of the most successful French thrillers of its year both commercially and critically, and consolidated Gozlan after his earlier Burn Out (2017) 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 responsible for forensic analysis of the cockpit voice recorders and flight data recorders recovered from civilian air disasters. He is unexpectedly assigned to lead the investigation of the black box from an Alpine commercial-airliner crash that has killed several hundred passengers. As his analysis deepens, he begins to suspect — against the consensus of his colleagues, his agency, and the airline — that the official conclusion is hiding something. André Dussollier plays his agency superior; Lou de Laâge is his architect wife who works for the airline manufacturer.

The film's procedural register — actual BEA technical detail, real spectrographic analysis software on screen, an unusually accurate aviation-industry portrait — placed it among the rare French thrillers whose technical credibility supports its third-act shifts. Niney, who began his Comédie-Française career at sixteen, anchors the entire investigation with the kind of nervous concentration the role asks for.