From the opening credits, Visions feels like déjà vu. First, a camera takes microscopic close-ups into a succession of pupils which seem to rotate on themselves. On these hypnotizing images, violins get carried away in a disturbing and troubled score. Then, the story opens with a blonde and distinguished heroine, swimming in a sea that seems to want to swallow her up.
Borrowings from Vertigo (1958) and Hitchcock in general are legion in the new film by Yann Gozlan (Black Box2021), who seems to have given himself the challenge of paying homage to all his heroes, unfortunately without too much subtlety, and sometimes to the detriment of his plot.
Diane Kruger plays Estelle, an airline pilot whose life is run like clockwork. In the cockpit as in the house she shares with Guillaume (Mathieu Kassovitz), her loving and protective husband, she notes, evaluates, repeats the same gestures, multiplies the lengths in the swimming pool, concocts her protein smoothie every morning, meticulously records her sexual activities in her ovulation calendar.
However, a breach appears in this rational and predictable existence when Estelle crosses paths with Ana (Marta Nieto) again in an airport corridor; a photographer, former lover, who broke his heart twenty years earlier. When Ana disappears, the pilot suspects murder, and sinks into a nightmarish and paranoid spiral that will cause her to lose touch with reality.
Yann Gozlan enjoys blurring the boundaries between dream and reality to lead the viewer down false trails. However, the startled awakenings and flashes of consciousness, although intriguing in small doses, are overused here to form a rather incoherent whole and too long to maintain the dramatic tension.
Unlike David Lynch, whom he also seems to want to emulate, the director only too rarely manages to create the desired effect of surprise and gets bogged down in a fishtail finale from which he nevertheless pretends to turn away throughout. of his story.
In this plot without head or tail, Diane Kruger and Matthieu Kassovitz still do well, and show themselves worthy of characters deprived of substance, immersed in a kind of coldness which reflects the general atmosphere of the film, and its flavor more formal than narrative.
Yann Gozlan takes great care with the images and architecture of the shots, with the connections and fades which enhance the beauty of a curve or exacerbate a psychological tension. This polished montage – peppered with references to Hitchcock and Lynch, but also to Brian de Palma and Roman Polanski – offers a few moments of grace, without managing to avoid the repetition of clichés associated with the masters. A film that will quickly be forgotten.