The Snake (Le Serpent)

Gallic writer-director Eric Barbier borrows Hitchcock's old premise of an innocent unjustly accused of lurid and brutal actions - with all evidence pointing inconveniently to him - for the Parisian-set thriller Le Serpent. Yvan Attal stars as Mandel, a slightly introverted photographer careening toward an ugly divorce from his affluent German wife. Back into his life waltzes Plender (Clovis Cornillac), a psychopath obsessed with obtaining vengeance on Mandel for a long-ago trauma that he believes the photographer caused during childhood. The revenge takes the form of a model who falsely accuses Mandel of rape and then turns up dead in the photographer's car - making him the number one suspect. At the same time, Plender begins to inveigle himself into the confidences of Mandel's unsuspecting family. Barbier also authored the screenplay, adapting a novel by Ted Lewis (Get Carter).