(Credit: Press)

The latest feature by French director and scriptwriter Yann Gozlan is a complex thriller constructed around a well-developed version of a popular archetype: the likeable nerd. Pierre Niney plays Mathieu Vasseur, whose work is reading and interpreting aircraft black boxes, CVRs or cockpit voice recorders for an airline in order to determine the causes of a flight mishap, mechanical failure, or crash. The plot is a suspenseful, gradually unfolding mystery concerning one such flight disaster. The film received five César nominations when released in France, as well as audience awards at two French film festivals.

Black Box takes its time introducing and establishing the main character’s personality. Mathieu is a neurotic perfectionist, extremely good at his job but terrible with people. We come to understand him as he is assigned to an initial case. Mathieu, less experienced but with incredible observational skills and patient self-training at hearing and identifying the faintest recorded sound, can pick up anomalies that others overlook or misinterpret. He succeeds brilliantly, in one case identifying likely terrorist activity. However, while Mathieu is precise, logical, careful, and thorough with his work, his intensity sometimes causes him to misread the data. More to the point, his lack of diplomacy, poor social skills, and uncompromising standards alienate his colleagues and hold him back from advancement. He is demoted to a minor role in the follow-up work.

At this point, the story begins to expand into a full-blown mystery. Mathieu continues to keep track of the crash investigation and comes to suspect something deeper is behind the plane’s malfunction. Having lost any influence at work, he privately monitors the aircraft’s data and finally determines to investigate on his own, secretly. The evidence, revealed in painfully slow increments, leads down a twisted, unlikely, and increasingly dangerous path as Mathieu obsessively tracks down clues, taking ever greater risks in his determination to ferret out the truth.

The film manages to sustain a steady, increasing tension throughout the lengthy rogue investigation, as new evidence is revealed and the potential dangers of unearthing dark secrets become more apparent. If Black Box has a flaw, it is simply that it has too much going on. The plot is not just complicated but dense with technical data, organisational levels, and relevant characters, along with constantly revised theories on Mathieu’s part. The storyline works partly because of the trouble taken to familiarise the audience with Mathieu’s peculiarities and to establish him as an odd but well-intentioned protagonist. We are carried along with him on his quest, which seems at first merely part of his compulsive approach to his work or even part of a developing paranoia. However, it remains uncertain for much of the film what is merely Mathieu’s speculation and what is genuine. This sustains the story’s tension and allows for a continual series of surprises and sharp turns as assumptions are disproven, and new theories emerge.

An important part of the film is the creative use of audio and visual material. The in-flight recordings being examined are often imperfect, containing static, inaudible dialogue and unidentified noises, any of which might be vital to explaining the disaster being investigated. Black Box adds interest to the playing and replaying of these recordings, partly by using extreme close-ups to draw us into Mathieu’s fascination with the puzzle these sounds represent. It achieves this far more effectively by using visual re-creations of actual events onboard the doomed aeroplane, as they are heard on the CVR. The re-enactments change very slightly each time we see them. Mathieu reinterprets the recordings and adds or alters details, sometimes mentally placing himself inside the plane as he calculates. We see his mental process acting out onscreen, avoiding the need for less interesting verbal explanations.

Mathieu comes across as a plausible hero due to his unique skills, but also a vulnerable one, given his inexperience, his difficulty reading people, and his obsessiveness. Pierre Niney’s performance keeps the character in that charged and hazardous zone throughout, carefully managed by Gozlan’s direction. Their previous collaboration may have helped: Niney worked with the director on an earlier suspense film, the 2015 blackmail drama Un Homme Idéal – oddly enough, playing a character Gozlan also named Mathieu Vasseur, for no readily available reason. 

The direction taken by the film’s various twists and turns, and the shocking information revealed, seems at times to reference possible corruption or collusion within private companies related to air travel or possibly within official agencies meant to oversee them. Nothing is quite specific enough to suggest the film has a particular target, but some of the material is suggestive. It adds a touch of authenticity to an already tense and action-packed investigative thriller.