A college lecturer flees to Paris after a scandal costs him his job. In the City of Lights, he meets a widow who might be involved in a series of murders.
The Woman In The Fifth is underdeveloped, incomplete and unpersuasive.
The paranoid spirit of early Polanski, but contrived attempts to ‘explain’ the film’s many mysteries ultimately disappoint.
The Woman In The Fifth is a slight piece, yet it isn’t without psychological pull.
An ambitious thriller from Pawlikowski assisted by excellent performances from Hawke, Kulig and Scott Thomas.
Unfortunately, Brit director Pawel Pawlikowski (My Summer of Love) can’t make any of this particularly gripping and, despite some committed performances, it’s too lacking in atmosphere to work as the Polanski-esque psychological mystery it clearly wants to be.
This film has to be indulged a little, and you'll have to negotiate the stumbling block that is Hawke's stodgy, dodgy French accent. Yet this movie moves at a sinuous, confident pace.
First-rate performances and occasional flourishes of tension can’t save this from being anything more than distinctly average workaday fare.
Hawke is splendid.
There is an elegance in Pawel Pawlikowski’s direction and elements of absurdist humour to lighten the mood but the end result still gives every appearance of the film having been made up as they went along.
It's all quite a disappointment.
It’s a rare film that leaves you wondering where it’s going, how it may end – and afterwards, even questioning what actually happened. It’s an intriguing enigma.
A generally terrible slice of supernatural hokum.
This is the nightmare territory of Cornell Woolrich, David Goodis and other American pulp authors much loved by Série noire readers, and Pawlikowski takes us on an edgy voyage au bout de la nuit.
By the end of the film, it looks as if Pawlikowski is exploring themes of desperate grief and ultimate acceptance and the sacrifice all great writers have to make in completing works of art; a fruitless sentiment really which will not impress its audience, it will merely baffle them.
It's an intriguing, noir-ish tale, with an unsettling air of surrealism and a vein of black humour. But when it drifts to a conclusion after a mere 83 minutes, you're left feeling that The Woman In The Fifth is a minor film assembled from all-too-familiar parts.
Hawke and Scott Thomas make a convincing pair of lost and damaged souls.
Pawel Pawlikowski
Pawel Pawlikowski on The Woman in the Fifth
General release. Check local listings for show times.
Cameo, Edinburgh from Friday March 9, 2012, until Thursday March 15, 2012. More info: http://www.picturehouses.co.uk/
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