“The Blue Room” is a tense, twisty, little thriller that certainly keeps you on your toes for the duration of its running time. However, it can also feel narratively constricted and underdeveloped in some areas. And by the end, it doesn’t leave the viewer with much to mull over.
The picture revolves around Julien (Mathieu Amalric, who also directed and co-wrote the screenplay), a successful agricultural machinery worker with a loving wife and a young daughter, who gets caught up in a passionate love affair with an old friend, Esther (Stephanie Cleau), who’s also married. Of course, that will come back to bite him when he’s charged for murder. Did he do it, or was he framed?
The movie is told through flashbacks from Julien’s point of view, as he relates to the police how the affair started and the events leading up to the murder. For the most part, Amalric paints Julien in a sympathetic light; he comes off as a nice guy who just happened to make a mistake. At the same time, Julien can’t be completely trusted: There are moments when his story doesn’t corroborate with what happens in the flashback. This tension and ambiguity is the most compelling part of “The Blue Room.”
Amalric (who had a supporting role in Wes Anderson’s “The Grand Budapest Hotel” earlier this year) has a perfect face — with his wide, buggy eyes — for conveying feelings of panic and uncertainty. As the movie goes on, his performance gets increasingly paranoid, but he also doesn’t go over-the-top. As a director, Amalric lets things unfold gradually; even at a brisk hour and 15 minutes, his pacing is deliberate, which allows him to sustain tension.
Unfortunately, the problem Amalric runs into by framing everything solely from Julien’s point of view is that the supporting characters remain rather undeveloped. At the beginning, Esther comes off as frisky and bored with her husband; but then when Julien cuts ties with her and tries to settle back into his mundane work and family life, she’s virtually nonexistent, occasionally showing up in the form of love letters to him. She very well could have set Julien up, but we don’t find out enough about her as a character to come to any sort of conclusion either way. Amalric doesn’t give her enough dimension.
On top of that, the picture’s conclusion feels somewhat underwhelming. There’s a trial and a verdict is given, but it doesn’t really explain much. We’re still uncertain as to what exactly happened.
As suspenseful as the movie is, the central mystery can feel a little too constricted and contained. Amalric doesn’t offer a solid answer to the mystery, and there’s not a lot of room to solve the mystery ourselves. “The Blue Room” would have benefited from being longer, to create more depth.
Even so, “The Blue Room” is still an entertaining and competently made mystery picture. You never know what direction it’s going to take while watching, which is something that’s relatively scarce in most mainstream cinema these days.