Reviewed by Alicia Glass

Review Rating: 8

In a futuristic Paris, a corrupt Police force and a rogue cop hunt a serial killer whose motives are much stranger than anyone realizes.

Alright, yes, this is another foreign movie, what can I say, I enjoy them. American cinema has been out of its heyday for some time now. This one, surprisingly, is a French foreign film and if you can find it, not one to miss. My one complaint is that, as with many futuristic foreign movies, the cinematography is so grand and so fast, you have trouble concentrating on both that and the subtitles.

So we have the cop David Hoffman and his partner, hunting down the serial killer Dmitri Nicolov. And of course Nicolov manages in the first few minutes of the movie to kill Hoffman’s partner and send him into a blind rage. He gets saddled with a new partner by the corrupt police chief, who it turns out is working with the people who are sending Romanov out to kill in the first place. Sound convoluted? That’s not even the half of it. The why, the why of sending out Nicolov to do his dark deeds, once the movie has gone through all of that and finally hits the audience over the head with the clue-by-four, is just great. Each minute detail of the story fits perfectly, no matter how small, and these wonderful storytellers manage to tell you how each piece fits without making you feel completely stupid for not having understood it immediately. I don’t want to give too much away or insult Chrysalis by comparing it to other films, but sometimes that gives us less cultured ones a frame of reference. Try and imagine a combination of Johnny Mnemonic and Strange Days, and you’ve got a brief glimpse to the story art that is this movie.

Worth the effort to find and watch, Chrysalis is a testament to the passion with which our foreign cousins make movies!