Dans la brume (2018)

(On TV, October 2020) I briefly interacted with director Daniel Roby prior to the release of his debut film La peau blanche back in 2003 (I coded the first iteration of the film’s web site) and we shared a common friend for a decade afterward, so I was favourably predisposed to see what he’d been up to recently, and that turns out to be the high-concept decently-budgeted French disaster film Dans la brume. The film’s first Big Idea is to have toxic gas emerging from the underground to blanket Paris with a thick multi-storey blanket of toxic fog, forcing two of our three main characters to find refuge in the top-floor apartment of their building. The third main character, in Dans la brume’s second Big Idea, is a teenager with a chronic health condition living in a hermetically-sealed bubble that periodically needs to be attended to during the resulting power outage. The main elements having been introduced, the script then goes on to further complicate the situation: ever step forward, such as getting out of the apartment, is accompanied by a step back—some of them frustratingly arbitrary. Still, there’s an interesting blend of thriller and science-fiction thinking at play here, with some horror thrown in late in the script in time for an ironic finale that is foreshadowed long before. There’s an eerie chill to the sequences in which the rooftops of Paris emerge from the toxic mist, or when the characters venture in the fog itself. Dans la brume is more gripping than expected, and while I have my concerns about the mean-spiritedness of the last act, the result is a striking piece of genre entertainment.