But enough of the tease, let’s get right into the action. The films begins on an idyllic night in the French countryside as Dr. Alex Beck (Francois Cluzet) and his wife Margot (Marie-Josee Croze) - sweethearts since childhood - go for a moonlight swim that turns deadly. When Margot interrupts their romantic reverie to let their family dog out, Alex listens in horror as he hears a scream. Trying to save his wife, he’s struck twice with a blunt object and left for dead.
The film cuts to eight years later as Alex, an unusually charismatic pediatrician who — imagine this irony — actually values his patients before payments, struggles to keep himself busy on the morbid anniversary of his wife’s death. While his best friend Helene (Kristin Scott Thomas, again as in Valet with a perfect French dialect) urges him to move on with his life, Alex is unable to do so, especially when new evidence comes to light surrounding the murder that had at the time been attributed to a crazed serial killer. Once the primary suspect in the case, Alex finds himself drawn back into the mystery after he receives a fascinatingly cryptic e-mail message in his Yahoo inbox and (thankfully, for the plot’s sake, ignoring every word about virus threats) opens it up only to see what appears to be fairly recent security camera footage of a very much alive and well Margot.
Although his anonymous sender warns him to “tell no one,” and he confides in Helene, soon with biased and increasingly suspicious police back on his case and mysterious, violent strangers following his every move, he revisits the details and figures involved in the horrid incident including his wife’s grieving parents, friends, and those who may have played a part. However, as the mystery grows with each new e-mail contact and the very real possibility that Margot may be trying to contact him, more foul play enters the film with all fingers pointing directly at Alex. Now a man on the run as a cross between The Fugitive’s Dr. Richard Kimball and every one of Hitchcock’s “wrong men,” he counts on assistance from contacts in the underworld including the scene-stealing Gilles Lellouche as Bruno, a criminal father grateful to the doctor for saving his beloved son to try to not only stay alive but avoid jail as more bodies are left in his wake on the fight for the truth.
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