French thriller will keep you guessing

A couple’s road trip to pick up their children at summer camp turns into a nightmarish “Twilight Zone” journey of fear and anger in the French thriller “Red Lights,” which opens Friday in limited release.

Based on a book by the late Belgian novelist Georges Simenon (“Inspector Maigret”) and directed and co-written by Cedric Kahn -- with a tip of the hat to Alfred Hitchcock and Claude Chabrol -- “Red Lights” stars Jean-Pierre Darroussin and Carole Bouquet as the bickering couple Antoine and Helene.

Darroussin’s fervid performance as the nebbish middle-aged Antoine -- he’s a cross between Wallace Shawn and Michel Blanc -- anchors this atmospheric, claustrophobic film. Antoine is a “man who is afraid of everything, including himself,” Kahn stated in an interview. “He cannot live his own life. That day, he starts drinking and everything starts to go wrong.”

Though the couple begin the journey in good spirits, they begin to snipe at each other cruelly as the freeway traffic turns into a bottleneck, partly due to a police manhunt for a ruthless killer.

Turning off the freeway for an uncertain detour, Antoine leaves Helene in the car while he grabs a quick drink at a roadside bar. As their bickering escalates, Antoine stops at another tavern, where he meets a mysterious man. Although what happens after he leaves the bar actually happens to the character in the Simenon novel, Kahn deftly lets the audience decide whether the drunken Antoine is hallucinating.

Hitchcock would have been pleased with the twist.

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-- Susan King