How I Killed My Father

Director Anne Fontaine’s chilly French melodrama sleepwalks through the personal crisis of married 40-year-old Versailles gerontologist Jean-Luc (Charles Berling). The doctor of suppressed aging has it all, at least superficially: caring wife, gorgeous home and affluent medical practice. The surprise arrival of his estranged father, Maurice (Michel Bouquet), who abandoned Jean-Luc and his younger brother Patrick (Stéphane Guillon) during their childhood, shatters this facade of personal contentment and success. Skeletons leap from the proverbial closet as this polite but tense father-son reunion psychologically dances around a past that has poisoned Jean-Luc’s adult life. Fontaine’s ambiguous Freudian journey into a domestic heart of darkness is a finely crafted bit of psychotherapy that doubles as a cure for insomnia.