Harry, Un Ami Qui Vous Veut Du Bien (aka With A Friend Like Harry) (2000)

After he runs into an old high school friend (Laurent Lucas), who's now married with three young daughters, a man (Sergi Lopez, PAN'S LABYRINTH) feels that his friend is wasting his life and talent on a bourgeois existence. He decides to do something about it but as the saying goes, with a friend like Harry, who needs enemies? This is one disturbing film. Early on we find out Harry is a psychopath and most of the film's tension comes from not only how far will he go (he appears to have no conscience) but how long before his friend discovers his insanity. Even more disturbing is the film's subtext: How often do we wish someone would just go away or die thus freeing us? Conscience, morals and societal taboos prevent us from doing anything but what if someone else, a sort of dark angel, did the dirty work. How clean are our hands by wanting it? This is the kind of script Hitchcock would have a field day with and the director Dominik Moll does a bang up job of turning on the screws ... and the guilt. Remarkably, with one exception, all the characters are unlikable. The two men appear to exist in a moral vacuum but the nagging wife (Mathilde Seigner) and crying kids are almost impossible to bear. The kindest character is Harry's mistress (lovely Sophie Guillemin, who looks like Drew Barrymore) and her fate is the unkindest cut of all.