Heartbeat Detector

It's a thin line between 20th-century Nazism and 21st-century corporate culture in Heartbeat Detector, Nicolas Klotz's rewardingly chilly psychological thriller.

Amalric gives another in a recent string of riveting performances, and Klotz gets a lot of play out of the ironic distance between musical expression and corporate rigor.

Here, knowledge and understanding raise more questions than they answer, and the film ends not in closure, but in openness. It is precisely those qualities that give Heartbeat Detector its epic sense of humanity. Take them away and you'd be left with a leaner but markedly less compelling workaday workplace thriller: "Michael Clayton" with Nazis instead of lawyers.

Both pertinent and discomfiting, this sober, well-cast drama remains quietly riveting, despite its 140-minute running time.

A chilling corporate thriller with an intriguing mystery on the surface and a deeply troubling idea at its dark core.

The movie is, arguably, too long and overladen with ideas. Klotz and Perceval are particularly keen on nailing the use and abuse of language in formatting human behavior.

Director Nicolas Klotz paces his mystery plot so luxuriously that it feels like a ride in a company limo, though his ultimate thesis, that corporate culture is inherently fascist, hardly seems worth the trip. The saving grace is Amalric, who looks so sharp in a tailored suit that he can't sense himself rotting from within.