Point Blank Review

As Fred Cavayé’s Anything For Her drove a wedge between husband and wife, so Point Blank pulls a couple apart through the machinations of circumstance and sheer bad luck. Sam (Gilles Lellouche) is a nursing aide who thwarts an attack on his patient; his good deed sees his pregnant wife kidnapped with her fate now in the hapless Sam’s hands. So far, so so, but it’s Cavayé’s insistent execution of this simple premise that’s so thrilling, that and the idea that there are no clear-cut good or bad guys in this murky world, just men on the margins doing anything to stay one step ahead. Roschdy Zem is fantastic as the dead-eyed villain, Hugo Sartet, while Gérard Lanvin is also brilliantly bleak as his nemesis, the chilling Commandant Werner — the two a pair of death’s head skulls driven towards an inexorable end.