Lemming (15) <!-- none onestar twostar threestar fourstar fivestar -->

Dream and reality overlap to unsettling effect in Dominik Moll's dark comedy of domestic rupture. Laurent Lucas and Charlotte Gainsbourg play a young married couple whose happiness together suddenly crumbles after an exquisitely horrible dinner party with Lucas's boss (André Dussollier) and his wife (Charlotte Rampling). Trouble is presaged by the discovery of a lemming in the sink waste pipe, then goes into overdrive when Rampling casts something like a witch's curse upon the hapless couple. Moll, hugging the implications of the story tight to his chest, doesn't conjure quite the ominous dread he did in Harry, He's Here To Help (2000), but his direction has an evenhanded cool that Hitchcock would have admired.