Mark of an Angel (2008)

This is a film where it really is best to know nothing about it beforehand. Don't watch the trailer. Don't read any reviews. (Don't even read this review!) Elsa is going through a sticky divorce. Works as an assistant in a pharmacy. Appears rational, has poise, is a seemingly normal – if depressive – middle-aged suburban mother.But then she spots little girl Lola at a birthday party. Can't take her eyes off her. Has to know about her. Has to get near her somehow. She's obsessed with the girl. As if she's seen a ghost.Is this girl Elsa's dead daughter Lucie reincarnated? (I'm wondering) Hope not. Don't want this film to turn into a supernatural freak out.Is little Lola gonna get pinched? Or her mother bumped off? Hope not. Don't want everything going bananas into psycho slasher melodrama either – Elsa going all crazy bonkers. Keep this restrained Mr Nebou (director), keep it all contained within the realms of plausibility.He does. Even though there's a scene where the 2 nice mothers have a bit of a ding dong (its a good fight too. By "good" i mean some serious hair pulling going on) No knifes come out though.The film sustains suspense throughout, engrossing you (me) with a thrillerish edge of tense dread right to the end.Turns out to be based on a true story. Really? Yep, it can/does happen. This film convinced me.

It's rare that you go into a movie aware of a sort-of familiar story (and this one, though true, is up with the Top 10 Lifetime plots), and a sort-of familiar genre and come out of the theater dazed at the uniquely transfixing experience you just had. Angel of Mine is one of those experiences.I really admired the way this film takes you down certain familiar paths (is it going to be a tearjerker like "The Notebook", a psycho-stalker like "The Hand That Rocks the Cradle") and then detours you completely. No, Angel of Mine is not in the same kind of "anything for a cheap rise" league.Catherine Frot and Sandrine Bonnair are always stunning but they work a kind of intuitive magic here. Indeed, the most electrifying moments between the two occur when they're being silent together.The photography is elegiac, the score poignant, the direction lucid and transparent.Get it out on Region 1 DVD folks....more people need to see this!

I thought this was a great film, totally compelling, with fine acting. In answer to the implausibility of the plot (based on true events) I would say that a mother can have a sixth sense about her offspring. Some people are much more visually aware than others and I think it's therefore possible to have an idea of what someone would look like years later. Besides there may well be photographs and memories of what close relatives looked like at a similar age which would heighten that sense of recognition. As for Sandrine Bonnaire not recognising Catherine Frot as the woman she presumed dead lying on the floor of the hospital, we don't know if they had much, if anything, to do with each other in the hospital and, panic-stricken as she was after realising that her own child had perished and in the midst of an inferno, it's perfectly plausible that she did not remember her. This is a film which will stay with me for some time and I'd thoroughly recommend it.

This has several things in common with Ruiz' Comedy de l'Innocence: in both a mother has lost a young child several years before the start of the film, in both the mother forms an attachment to a child with parents of its own and in both there are implausibilities which are, to some extent, compensated for by outstanding acting. As the two previous posters have already revealed the plot I need only reiterate the SPOILER warning before discussing the flaws. We meet Catherine Frot in the midst of a divorce and sharing custody of her son, Thomas, with her estranged husband. At a children's party she appears drawn to a girl of perhaps seven or eight and determines to find out all she can about her. Turns out that Lola is the daughter of Sandrine Bonnaire and has a brother, Jeremie, the same age as Thomas who Frot uses as a lever to insinuate herself into the Bonnaire household. After an early meeting Bonnaire remarks to her husband what a nice woman Frot is. Frot becomes convinced that Lola is the daughter who burned to death in a hospital fire seven years ago and confides as much in her parents. She confronts Bonnaire and offers to pay for a DNA test. Bonnaire naturally thinks she is crazy but when Bonnaire's husband says a DNA test will clearly resolve the matter Bonnaire admits to Frot that Lola is indeed her child. Bonnaire was at the hospital, saw Frot out cold and assumed she was dead. She then exchanged her own dead infant with Frot's. Flaw #1. How could Frot detect that a seven year old girl was the child she last saw at FIVE DAYS OLD. How come Bonnaire NEVER RECOGNISED Frot when she later admits thinking she saw her dead. Apart from this Frot is outstanding and Bonnaire only a whisker behind.