Dir. Benoît Jacquot. 86 minutes.
Laura (Julia Roy) is recently married to Jacques (Mathieu Amalric), a fidgety, self-involved movie director. After Jacques suddenly dies, Laura still finds herself hearing his voice and catching glimpses with him. Eventually, Laura seems to develop a closer bond with her husband’s mute ghost than she ever did with the real article.
“Black Swan,” “Taxi Driver,” “Repulsion”: by now, movies about people gradually losing their minds should qualify for their own subgenre. What does “Never Ever” bring to the table? Lucid, clean cinematography that catches like the shine of fluorescent tubes on linoleum. Blunt storytelling with no time expository diversions. Mathieu Amalric, who is always delightful, even if he does spend most of this film wafting in and out of existence. With his amphibian eyes, monumental nose and finicky mannerisms, Amalric is the quintessence of the Frenchman. “Never Ever” is meticulous and deliberate, tantalizing us with the promise of some terrible catastrophe.
What “Never Ever” doesn’t give us is a fresh, satisfying or useful ending. After Jacques’s death, Laura grows more and more obsessively attached a hallucinated version of him. And then? Nothing, really. The movie just ends — or, rather, stops. There’s also some unintentional comedy when Roy, a 25-year-old waif who looks like she should be modeling for Karl Lagerfeld, starts aping the mannerisms of her middle-aged, gravelly voiced dead husband. It’s not unsettling, just kind of silly.
2/5
