Madeleine Collins

Efira’s ability to play manipulative and nurturing, cunning and hurt, selfishly deceitful and vulnerable is impressive, and utterly necessary for the twists this script (by Barraud and Héléna Klotz) serves up.

Seemingly channeling the spirit of Claude Chabrol, Antoine Barraud’s Madeleine Collins is a decidedly classy throwback thriller about a seemingly humdrum character committing perverse acts of subterfuge against others.

Barraud offers a satisfyingly slippery tale in which we think we know where it might be headed but are constantly met by a little twist or discovery that puts everything into a different perspective.

The movie is most naturally a showcase for Efira, whose work as an unusual 17th-century nun in “Benedetta” demonstrated she could play dazzling and tormented with equal facility and who gets to work a similar range here.

Despite Efira’s efforts, Judith’s inevitable breakdown never hits a satisfyingly deranged register. Her motivations turn out to be less spicy, and more blandly sympathetic than one had hoped from this pressure cooker of a film.

Part of the attraction of Madeleine Collins is in seeing how far Barraud is willing take things until providing a reasonable explanation. It’s a tricky balancing act that’s one-third Hitchcockian intrigue and one-third Chabrolian study of broken bourgeois homes, with the final third bordering on kitsch.