Only the Animals

Dominik Moll made With a Friend Like Harry in 2000 and then spent two decades slightly outside the mainstream of French cinema before this adaptation of Colin Niel's novel brought him back. It played San Sebastián in 2019 and was a substantial hit in France.

A woman disappears from a snowbound plateau in the Causse Méjean. Moll tells the story five times, each chapter belonging to a different person, each one beginning somewhere earlier than you expect and revealing that the previous chapter was missing its most important fact. A farmer living alone with his animals; an insurance agent doing his rounds of remote hamlets; his wife, who is bored; a young waitress; and, in the section that gives the film its scope, a man in Abidjan running an online scam. Denis Ménochet, Laure Calamy, Damien Bonnard and Nadia Tereszkiewicz make up the ensemble.

The structural conceit could be a gimmick and is not, because Moll uses it to make a point about loneliness: every character is acting on a completely wrong idea of what somebody else feels, and the film's chain of misunderstanding runs from a French mountainside to west Africa without ever treating the connection as a coincidence. It is a genuinely clever thriller, and the cold of the plateau is in every frame.