A NAILBITING TALE ... IN ANY LANGUAGE

OF A pair of foreign-language thrillers newly available today, Persian Lessons (15, ★★★★I) is easily the pick: it’s a hugely compelling, highly original Holocaust drama, billed as Belarusian though it unfolds mostly in German, and is said to have been inspired by true events.

Argentinian actor Nahuel Perez Biscayart, left, is quite brilliant in the central role as Gilles, a rabbi’s son from Antwerp, who in a French forest clearing in 1942 escapes execution by claiming to be not Jewish but Persian.

He is carted off to a transit camp, all set to be transported somewhere even worse, but finds the pretence can help him not just to survive but even thrive, as tutor to a German officer, Koch (Lars Eidinger), who is eager to learn the Persian language, Farsi. The problem for

Gilles is that he knows no more Farsi than the officer does, so he begins to invent words, with his life depending on remembering all the hundreds he has made up.

And as if that were not perilous enough, there is a guard intent on exposing him as a Jew and a fraudulent purveyor of gobbledygook.

Vadim Perelman’s film arguably strains our credulity by asking us to believe in Koch’s, but the story is so well told and the performances so strong (especially Biscayart’s) that I found myself completely invested in Gilles, his deception and his fate.

THE Exception (15, ★★III) is an overambitious Danish thriller about four female co-workers at Copenhagen’s ‘Centre for Information on Genocide’, one of them played by Sidse Babett Knudsen of the TV drama Borgen, and all of them coping with various travails either psychological, physical, emotional or all of the above.

When one of the women starts receiving death threats by email, suspicion at first falls on a Serbian war criminal, but then it begins to dawn on them that it might be one of their own number.

The film tries hard to conflate office politics with the psychology of genocide, but it’s a conceit that feels too self-conscious to work and it all starts getting a bit silly — a fatal blow for any thriller.

(Both films are available on digital platforms from today.)