A good pitch, such as the one behind the French aviation thriller Black Box (Boîte noire), can only travel so far when the characters provide little fuel for the story. At some point, usually toward the middle of the second act, the movie stutters, stalls and then takes a nosedive, crashing well before the closing credits start to roll.
And yet, things begin promisingly enough in this fourth feature by Gallic genre junkie Yann Gozlan, who previously made the Hitchcockian suspenser A Perfect Man and the action-packed motorcycle movie Burn Out, which had a decent second run on Netflix. This film, which was released wide in France and has sold well abroad, also feels like fodder for a streaming service or perhaps something to watch on a long transatlantic flight — although at a stretched-out 129 minutes you may wind up dozing off.
In a scenario (written by Gozlan, Simon Moutaïrou and Nicolas Bouvet-Levrard) that’s equal parts Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation and Robert Zemeckis’ Flight, we’re plunged into a fatal plane crash in the Alps that results in over 300 casualties. At the offices of the BEA, the French government agency in charge of investigating the accident, up-and-coming audio analyst Mathieu (Pierre Niney) is tasked with figuring out what happened, his stern boss Philippe (André Dussolier) eager for fast answers.
As one of the BEA’s best “ears,” Mathieu is brilliant at his job but also way too obsessed with it — a fact Gozlan exposes several times in the first act as we watch the wide-eyed Niney listen to flight recordings from the film’s titular device (which we learn, among other things in the well-researched but boilerplate script, is not actually black but orange).
Mathieu quickly deduces that a lone terrorist caused the crash by forcing his way into the cockpit, and the affair is easily wrapped up. But as it’s roughly 20 minutes into the movie, you don’t have to be Harry Caul (to cite the great Gene Hackmann character from Coppola’s film) to figure out there’s more to the accident than meets the ear.
After hearing a voice message left by one of the passengers before the crash, Mathieu begins to have major doubts that push him to dig deeper. The plot thickens when we learn that another BEA expert (Olivier Rabourdin) has mysteriously disappeared. Meanwhile, there are a bunch of unexplainable connections between Mathieu’s wife and fellow flight specialist, Noémie (Lou de Laâge), and a corporate-climbing friend of theirs (Sébastien Poudreoux) working for the airline whose plane went down. It seems like the entire French aviation industry may be caught up in the conspiracy.
It also seems way too ominious and overcooked. This is the kind of film where every single dialogue is about aircraft safety protocols, to the point that nothing else exists and the characters are all stone-faced prisoners to the plot. Gozlan’s depiction of Mathieu and his fellow professionals is so drop-dead serious that it becomes almost risible, with the actors dashing off technical jargon like they were in a Molière play rewritten by Bill Gates. In the movie’s one and only love scene, Noémie is turned on after Mathieu successfully uses a PowerPoint display to explain the accident at a jam-packed press conference, straddling him when they got back home to their apartment. Whatever floats your boat — or flies your Airbus A380.
Gozlan is a technically proficient filmmaker who has well-integrated the codes of the suspense genre, working here with cinematographer Pierre Cottereau (who shot the Netflix thriller The Wolf’s Call, which delves into similar audio-themed territory) to give Black Box a steely sheen that feels like David Fincher, but with less finesse and manic perfection. The impressive sound design, by Bouvet-Levrard, Nicolas Provost and Marc Doisne, captures every miniscule wave and snippet of atmosphere, mimicking the workings of Mathieu’s talented ears, as well as the tinnitus that hits him when he’s stressed out.
But there’s nothing much else to him, or to the film in general, beyond the nonstop narrative twists, turns and reversals, and at some point we really don’t care what happens anymore. Late in the game, Gozlan tries to add some depth to Mathieu’s life, with, you guessed it, a reference to his father having been a great airline pilot, but it’s so much of a textbook backstory that it bounces off us without ever resonating. By the time we see him racing yet again in his car to an unknown location, rain pouring down and the GPS buzzing, we’ve already landed, disembarked, grabbed our luggage and left the airport.
Director: Yann Gozlan
Screenplay: Yann Gozlan, Simon Moutaïrou, Nicolas Bouvet-Levrard
Cast: Pierre Niney, Lou de Laâge, André Dussollier, Sébastien Pouderoux, Olivier Rabourdin
Producers: Wassim Béji, Matthias Weber
Cinematography: Pierre Cottereau
Production design: Michel Barthélémy
Costume design: Olivier Ligen
Editing: Valentin Féron
Music: Philippe Rombi
Production companies: WY Productions, 2425 Films (France)
World sales: StudioCanal
In French
129 minutes
