Knife Edge

Quite some time passed, I admit, since I last saw an enthralling thriller. Knife Edge is just what this forgotten genre needed. A good thriller is hard to come by, that's just it. I can't even remember my last enjoyable one. Most of them now blend with horror and indulge in such clichees that you can't separate consumerism from sheer stupidity.

Of course, the first 20 minutes showed us the limits of the director and the acting was a bit sketchy at times. Then again, that's what I remember about classic thrillers. Deep characters, although mostly bi-dimensional, that suffer through a linear story until some twists that confront the viewer to shift allegiances take place.

I really liked Nathalie Press' performance in My Summer of Love and here she is a credible mother and new wife in a past-haunted (not The Shining-haunted) mansion, reminding us of Rosemary. Sure, all in all it was without originality and it didn't manage to expand from its genre. But the cinematography is excellent, the story, to use a line from the movie "dickensian", and it doesn't look to rely on artifices such as gratuitous nudity or butchering violence. It just delivers.

7/10