Have you ever been out in public and encountered somebody who knows you, yet you don't have a clue who the heck they are?  You know, you just play along until, hopefully, they go away?  That's the basic gist of the new French thriller, With a Friend Like Harry.  It's creepy and unnerving when contrasted with Hannibal's campy gore,

Harry begins with a scene that could be a flashback to every awful family car trip you've ever been on, meaning it's hot, cramped and there's a whole lot of yelling and bickering.  In a rest stop men's room, Michel (Laurent Lucas) notices a man grinning at him as he enjoys a few moments of relief from the long, sweaty trip to his family's rundown vacation home.  The man introduces himself as Harry Balestrero (Sergi López, An Affair of Love), a former grade-school classmate that Michel just can't remember.  After rattling off the names of a few of their mutual classmates, Michel becomes convinced he knows Harry, and the two men shake hands and head for their cars.

In the parking lot, Harry and his curvy girlfriend Prune (Sophie Guillemin) offer to take Michel and his wife Claire (Mathilde Seigner, Venus Beauty Institute) out for drinks.  Michel and Claire decline, as their three young daughters are just too worn out, but since their well-to-do counterparts seem to be aimlessly wandering around Europe with no time constraints, the two couples decide to meet at Michel's fixer-upper.

After they've had a few drinks, Harry brings up the topic of poetry and astonishes his hosts by reciting, word for word, a poem called "The Dagger in the Skin of Night" that Michel wrote as a child.  As if that weren't enough, he begins to narrate passages from the first chapter of a novel (called "Flying Monkeys") that Michel abandoned as an elementary school writer.  Michel and Claire are taken aback, but since Harry seems to be a nice, honest man, they seem to brush the incident aside.

Long story short, Harry begins to act more and more strangely, buying Michel and Claire a brand-new SUV and partaking in some bizarre post-coital eating rituals as he slowly worms his way into their lives.  He's a cross between a slightly more bent Tom Ripley (as in The Talented Mr.) and a much more intelligent Buck (as in Chuck and).  Harry is a film that could be set anywhere and feature any kind of protagonist, but it works so much better when you introduce a malevolent character into the life of a young, married couple (kids optional) at just the right time, and watch the sparks fly (a la Pacific Heights).  López is great as Harry, exuding the same silent type of lunacy that Bob Hoskins perfected in Felicia's Journey.  Lucas and Seigner are both very likeable, thereby doing their jobs in creating characters that viewers can root for.

To say Harry is Hitchcockian might be the understatement of the year.  Harry's character gets its name from two of Hitch's '50s flicks – The Trouble With Harry and The Wrong Man, where Henry Fonda played Manny Balestrero. The story brings to mind another '50s classic from Hitchcock – Strangers on a Train, which was based on a novel written by Patricia Highsmith.  She also penned Ripley, so it comes as no surprise that Harry, Ripley and Strangers' Bruno Antony are all smooth, charming sociopaths that immediately rub you the wrong way despite not doing anything to warrant such feelings (and their names all end in the letter "y," so you know the Puffy jury really blew it).

Writer/director Dominik Moll, who, together with Criminal Lovers' François Ozon, has made France the new creepy capital of the world (well, second to that rest stop I just visited in Lodi, Ohio), has fashioned an outstanding second feature after working as an assistant director on Laurent Cantet's Human Resources.  The brightly photographed Harry also shares a cinematographer (Matthieu Poirot-Delpech) and co-writer (Gilles Marchand) with the drab but entertaining Resources.  López, Moll and the film's editing (by The Dreamlife of Angels' Yannick Kergoat) and sound all won César Awards (the film was nominated in just about every other category, as well).

1:55 –

for language, some violence and a scene of nudity