An innocent looking beauty uses her deceptively timid appearance to destroy the lives of strangers and friends alike in director Michel Spinosa's portrait of one woman's shocking descent into self-destruction. Despite the fact that Anna (Isabelle Carré) always appears calm and collected on the outside, beneath her skin boils a simmering cauldron of delusion and despair. When concerned but married Dr. Andre Zanevsky (Gilbert Melki) helps Anna to regain her mental footing following a near-fatal
suicide attempt, the disturbed patient tragically misconstrues his professional kindness as passionate romantic advances. But Dr. Zanevsky has been nothing but professional ever since Anna began treatment, leaving him deeply disturbed to discover that she has interpreted every small friendly gesture as a declaration of undying love. Though Dr. Zanevsky does his best to convince Anna that he is happily married, she soon begins stalking him from around every corner, snooping through his mail, and trying to convince his wife that he no longer loves her. Later, after Anna lands a job as a nanny in the apartment just above Dr. Zanevsky and his wife, she manages to find a way into their apartment and leaves a clue that she's never far away. Realizing that her disturbed daughter is no longer in control of her own thoughts, Anna's mother (Genevieve Mnich) reluctantly has her committed. But Anna won't be dissuaded from her goal quite so easily, and soon sets out to convince him of her love once and for all. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi
Isabelle Carré is superb as Anna, but the problem is the tone. Caught between psychological study and thriller, it aims for both - but achieves neither.
The sheer ferocity of the central performance in this French psychological drama from writer-director Michel Spinosa is what saves it from being slightly one-dimensional.
With a strong performance from Isabelle Carré, Anna M. is an entertaining film, but it is also confused and slight, and like its anti-heroine, is in need of a firmer grip on reality.
Writer-director Michel Spinosa, harnessing a powerhouse central performance from Carré, has managed to hit the ground between giddy Hollywood thriller and brooding arthouse character piece.
For a film that presents itself as a case-study, Anna M has no trouble in chucking plausibility out of the window - would she really get a job as a nanny with that loony smile and no references? - and suffers from a mystifying and unsatisfactory ending.
Unfortunately, as director Michel Spinosa has discovered, making a Fatal Attraction-esque thriller that's also a serious study of mental illness is a lot harder than it sounds.
A decent Parisian thriller that rides on the tails of a calling-card turn from Isabelle Carré as a lovelorn stalker-cum-social-menace who falls in love with her doctor.
Increasingly unhinged female-stalker film that starts off as a rip-off of The Piano Teacher, but moves past its early penchant for pretentious navel gazing (literally) and develops into something genuinely unsettling and blackly comic, with a masterful performance by Isabelle Carre in the title role.
Horrible film really. Misery, hopelessness, loneliness are amplified to disturbing effect. Psychologically harrowing study of erotomania, it's apparent incurability and it's devastating effects on all involved. Leaves a nasty taste.
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