dbdumonteil "Qui a tué Bambi?" has big qualities:gore and special effects are almost absent and the story is wrapped in an agonizing atmosphere .The director knows his classics: in turn ,I've thought of Henri-Georges Clouzot's "la Prisonnière" (the relationship between the doctor and the nurse which verges on sado-masochism) ,of Crichton' s "Coma" (there's an hospital where patients disappear,and one of their surgeons' behavior is dubious),of Polanski's "Rosemary's baby " (a character is in the middle of a strange conspiracy ,nobody believes her,but there's more: the jewel the doctor gives to the nurse strongly recalls the one Minnie Castevet gives to Rosemary;and in both movies the jewels had belonged to another woman (dead) before)and of "Carnival of souls" (the car wreck).The director adds hints at Walt Disney's "Bambi" as well;the title is no misnomer: "Your mother will not come round anymore" " Your legs are giving way under you,just like Bambi" .Perhaps the best ideas of the script are the "games" subject: an innocent game the nurses play in the corridor where they tell if a person is a man or a woman by the way they look at their fingernails; wicked games such as the consonants and the vowels one.You may remember in "the crying game" the story called "the scorpion and the frog" which comes back later at the end of that Jordan film . "The consonants and the vowels " game plays the same part here.It's downright disturbing when the nurse plays it for the first time in a hellish nightclub.The second time,not only the heroine but also the audience can play too.The two leads are convincing and they never overplay ,which is a tour de force in such a context.One can regret the last minute .It comes almost as an anticlimax.It's a good thriller.The director knows his classics.

Robert J. Maxwell I missed the first 15 minutes or so and that might be why the ending left me as confused as it did. I mean, what happened to the doc? Was the forest and the hole part of a dream? Was the whole movie a dream? Did I fall asleep and dream it all myself? In any case, I found this to be pretty good. It's slow, of course, by the standards of, say, "Coma", or "Freddy and Jason Haunt a Hospital," but the visual images, the score, and the acting make up for it and keep a viewer's attention engaged.The visual images are striking in their sterility and simplicity. It's not not like any hospital you've ever been except maybe in a couche-mar. The hospitals I'm familiar with -- the better ones -- have people bustling about night and day, and the floors have coded colored lines on them. This hospital is mostly empty. And oddly lighted. Even the OR is dark except for some dramatic lighting over the patient etherized upon the table. In the corridors, the FLOORS seem to emit their own white light.There is hardly any score to speak of. There is usually an ominous discordant electronic hum. Aside from that there is only a slight groan from an opening door and the squeak of rubber soles on polished linoleum. Well, an occasional scream too.The acting is fine on everyone's part. Dr. Phillip's role doesn't call for much except a haughty look and a stern tone. But Isabella is just about right. Few people have ever looked so winsome and helpless. She has a slight figure and the face of an adolescent girl. (Try to imagine Gerard Depardieu in the part.) The story itself is rather routine. We've seen it in one or another variation before. But this is a well-done example of the genre, worth catching.

raymond-15 Isabelle ( Sophiie Quinton) a hospital nurse not yet fully certificated suffers from dizzy spells due to an ear problem. One of the senior surgeons Dr. Philip (Laurent Lucas) calls her Bambi. A stupid remark in my opinion and not befitting his character. The hospital looks ever so hygienic with its rooms and corridors in dazzling white and the doctors and nursing staff uniformed in white, white, white! But strange events are happening in this spotless hospital...patients are waking up under anaesthesia....patients are disappearing from their beds....what has gone awry?As events unfold Isabelle, a sweet young thing, has strong suspicions about Dr. Philip's behaviour, but she really hasn't any proof. The film mainly concerns Isabelle's attempts to solve the hospital's continuing problems. The film is well cast with Dr. Philip suitably stern, morose and unyielding and little Bambi sweet and innocent and unsure of her nursing capabilities. (She may have done better in the police force!) As a thriller there are no menacing gestures and the excitement is restricted mainly to the dialogue.The operating theatre has an air of authenticity about it as do the surgeons and nursing staff going about their business with hyperdermic needles and scalpels. I must say I think it was amiss of the medical staff not to notice the puncture in the fresh Pentothal phials. A minor criticism perhaps. As for the disappearing patients, it is a well known fact that frustrated patients do discharge themselves on occasions at short notice.These thrillers are often conceived in such a way with clues that deceive. Consequently, with this in mind I carefully explore the motives of each character. I regret to say that I was tricked into coming to a wrong conclusion about the perpetrator of the crimes.If you like hospital dramas and are not booked into an operating theatre in the near future, this film is for you.

jwarthen-1 A pretty dreadful French thriller in which a gifted scenarist may be learning how to direct. The 126 minutes' length hints of a genre-piece that can't stop itself: the director wrote twice as many fainting scenes, dream sequences, and face-offs between heroine-villain as any film could sustain, and then left in every damned one of them. Its only suspense lies in the gradually revealed nastiness of the director himself-- "He's not going to do THAT to his actors.... My God, he really IS." The casting and the peculiar violations of genre logic show vestiges of a much better movie than BAMBI. In a day full of interesting French films shown at Boston's MFA, this ringer, of course, turned out to be the only one secured for American distribution. You are seeing the Director's Cut on screen-- a case in which a Studio version of this frayed and rough-cut would be superior.