Who You Think I Am

Dir: Safy Nebbou (1hr 42mins) (15)

★★★★

This “small but perfectly formed” thriller stars Juliette Binoche “at her most mercurial” as Claire, a fiftysomething literature professor looking for love on the Paris dating scene, said Kevin Maher in The Times. Her husband has left her for another woman, and she’s devastated when her rebound fling, a goodlooking younger man called Ludo, also dumps her – using a friend of his, Alex, to do the dirty work. She logs onto Facebook to spy on Ludo, but instead finds herself interested in Alex, and poses as a gorgeous 24-year-old to “catfish” him. Her revenge plan backfires when they fall for each other in cyberspace, sending the story onto a slalom course that marks director Safy Nebbou out as “a worthy heir to Hitchcock”.

Binoche is a wonderfully expressive actress, and there’s a kind of “illicit thrill” in watching her “dive so committedly into this woman’s damage, drugged by the dopamine hit” she gets from Alex’s online attention, said Tim Robey in The Daily Telegraph. Terrified of rejection, Claire “cuts a lost and neurotic figure”, but her online gamble is merely “the logical extension of everyone’s best-foot-forward Tinder profiles”. The film is “deliciously twisty”, and full of “cracked humour”, said Mark Kermode in The Observer. And while its focus on physical separation and virtual connection feels almost eerily “timely”, its power is rooted in “age-old anxieties: the fear of ageing and death; the desire for intimacy and reassurance; the allure of artifice and deceit”. Available from

Curzon Home Cinema.