Lemming

Lemming (2005) is Dominik Moll's French psychological thriller, available to watch online on iFILM. Alain, a young engineer, has just moved to a new town with his wife Bénédicte. They invite his boss and the boss's wife to dinner — and one quiet evening detonates everything they had.

The guests are an older couple eaten through with contempt: the cruel, hard-drinking Alice (Charlotte Rampling) and her glacial husband Richard (André Dussollier). Then a dead lemming turns up jammed in the kitchen drain, a rodent that has no business being anywhere near France. From that small wrongness the ordinary life of Alain and Bénédicte (Laurent Lucas and Charlotte Gainsbourg) starts to slip. His wife seems to become someone else, and the line between domestic drama and something unexplainable quietly dissolves.

Moll works the same ground as Hitchcock and Lynch, keeping you unsure whether you are watching a thriller, a marriage falling apart, or a slow ghost story. The film opened the 2005 Cannes Film Festival. At 130 minutes it rewards viewers who like genre that refuses to fully explain itself. Stream Lemming (2005) online on iFILM.