So I saw the French thriller Tell No One (Ne le dis à personne if, like my girlfriend, you’re into lording your fluency over others) the other night.

Without giving too much away, the basic plot is as follows: Alex Beck, a young doctor, is vacationing with his (really) lovely wife at the same lake they’ve been visiting since they were children. While skinny dipping at night, he is assaulted and knocked unconscious. By the time he comes to, days later, his wife has already been found dead.

Fast forward eight years: Dr. Beck has put his life back together – though you kind of get the feeling there’s not much keeping him going – when two bodies are discovered at the lake. Forensic testing shows they’re eight years dead. Meanwhile, someone has begun sending him cryptic videos suggesting that his wife might not be.

It’s a terrific premise, and it’s followed through intelligently and gracefully in a way that most Hollywoodish thrillers aren’t these days, which is to say in a way that is neither stupidly obvious, nor ridiculously convoluted – the kind of thing that Wild Things was partly satirizing and partly indulging in.

It’s not exactly a noir, though it has some noirish features: dead wives, decadent rich families with mind-blowing secrets, etc. It could probably best be described as a film of the Ordinary Guy Who Gets Suddenly and Viciously Fucked by a Hostile Universe subgenre. There’s no section at Blockbuster for this, but there are actually a lot of these. They’re similar to and sometimes overlap with films of the Ordinary Guy Whose Happy Life Turns Out to be a Lie subgenre. Both of these tend to involve women.

The ne plus ultra, of course, is North by Northwest, though others would include The 39 Steps, The Game, Breakdown, Marathon Man, The Magus (the book, not the movie), The Spanish Prisoner, etc. (The Matrix also plays on this phenomenon to some extent, but is stupid and postmodern about it.) Noirs like The Big Sleep and Chinatown don’t really count, because their protagonists are private detectives and therefore are already in the game and can’t be too surprised when shit starts to go down.

Now, maybe it’s just because I’m an egotist, but I would personally be flattered as hell to be dropped into one of these scenarios. Look, you’re living an ordinary and frankly dull life – bowl of Cheerios in the morning, desk job, etc.; all of a sudden, karma or a shadowy government agency or some staggeringly attractive female basically singles you out for a thrilling new life, one in which malevolent forces that previously took no notice of your existence are now thoroughly dedicated to fucking you up. Hey, at least you matter.

Back to the film, though. Tell No One suffers from the same fundamental ailment that afflicts all films of this genre: namely, the denouement and unraveling of the plot twists can never live up to what is promised by the preceding two hours or so.

The truth is, it isn’t supposed to, as the enjoyment of this type of film is predicated upon the continued mystery. The tension the viewer feels is not just empathetic – on behalf of whatever poor sap is being jerked around by the plot mechanisms – but direct, i.e., the viewer is thrilled by the existence of this vast conspiracy and partially feels implicated in the plot itself because the viewer, like the protagonist, has no idea what the fuck is going on. (Also, unlike the protagonist, the viewer’s enjoyment is not undercut by the possibility of being tortured and/or killed).

The conspiracy – not the truth behind it—is what drives this sort of plot. Alfred Hitchcock sort of solves this problem in Vertigo by giving up the game about midway through the film, from which point on the tension results not from the mystery at the heart of the plot, but from watching him turn the screws on the characters.

But for most filmmakers, the mystery’s the thing, and the bigger the better. There’s a famous and possibly apocryphal story about the making of The Big Sleep, where director Howard Hawks realizes the script doesn’t jibe. So he calls up screenwriter William Faulkner (yes, that William Faulkner, whose slumming in Hollywood was the inspiration for the Coen brothers’ Barton Fink) to ask who killed one of the characters. Faulkner doesn’t know, so he calls up author Raymond Chandler, who wrote the novel the film was adapted from. Chandler says he has no idea.

In the end, they all pretty much conclude that it makes no difference. And, of course, they’re right.