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A careworn husband is accused of murdering his wife in a story inspired by a real life case that dispenses with the genre’s familiar brutality

Here is a fictionalised true crime drama, but one that is more stately and sedate than the garish procedural brutality of regular true crime. There is one gruesome crime-scene photo, but otherwise this could really have been based on something by Ruth Rendell. It is co-written and directed by its star Daniel Auteuil and the original French title is Le Fil (The Thread), after an incriminating thread of material found on the corpse – or perhaps it means the thread of logic behind a legal argument, the loose thread which, if pulled sufficiently, might cause the whole thing to collapse.

The action is based on a case recounted by Jean-Yves Moyart, a criminal defence lawyer, who blogged under the name “Maître Mô” and who died...