Grade: B

Though the title might suggest that Anne Fontaine’s film is another of the many Hitchcockian thrillers that have come out of France lately, that turns out not to be the case. “How I Killed My Father” is instead a chilly, brooding but quietly resonant psychological study of domestic tension and unhappiness. Deliberate in its pacing, beautifully acted and skillfully directed, the picture requires a viewer’s patience and attention, but the effort pays substantial dividends.

The script, by Fontaine and Jacques Fieschi (whom you might know from his collaboration in the screenplays for two fine Claude Sautet films, the exquisite 1992 “Un coeur en hiver” and the equally effective 1995 “Nelly et Monsieur Arnaud,” though he also co-wrote two less successful recent pictures, “Place Vendome” and “Les Destinees”), opens as Jean-Luc (Charles Berling), a successful gerontologist with a clinic in Versailles, is being feted by the locals at an elegant soiree. To his astonishment, his long-absent father Maurice (Michel Bouquet) shows up at the gathering. Maurice abandoned the family years ago to set up a clinic in Africa; he returns impoverished as a result of a revolution that led to the confiscation of the property. Jean-Luc, clearly seething under a placid exterior, invites the old man to stay for a few days with him and his upper-class wife Isa (Natacha Regnier), but he’s clearly haunted by what he considers his father’s long-ago betrayal. Maurice’s attitude toward the sort of practice his son has set up–catering to the extravagantly well-to-do–doesn’t help matters; nor does the friendship the older man strikes up with Isa (whom Jean-Luc has counseled against having children, for what he says are medical reasons), or the rapprochement between Maurice and Jean-Luc’s younger brother Patrick (Stephane Guillon), an aspiring nightclub comic whom his sibling has taken on as a chauffeur. His father’s presence also seems a standing condemnation of Jean-Luc’s affair with his nurse Myriem (Amira Casar).

“How I Killed My Father” is thus focused on the emotional turbulence caused by the father’s long-delayed return. For Jean-Luc, Maurice’s reappearance reawakens his anger at the ease of his original desertion–a rage magnified with Maurice shows paternal affection for an African doctor (Hubert Kounde) who comes to visit. For Isa, it leads to a reconsideration of her marriage, and rage over the desperate lengths to which her husband has gone to avoid making his father’s mistakes. For Patrick, it represents perhaps his final opportunity to come to terms with his own failures. And for Maurice, of course, it provides a last chance to reconnect with his children. But none of this is played out in the melodramatic fashion such material would seem to invite. Fontaine’s is essentially a cerebral film in which the characters, apart from occasional eruptions, respond to their circumstances with typically Gallic reserve; much is implied rather than stated. The tone is set by Berling, who maintains an almost preternaturally calm exterior, and Bouquet, who as Maurice pads about in a scruffy coat or homely pajamas with an impish disdain for any kind of regret over his choices in life. The two men complement each other remarkably well–they even resemble one another sufficiently to be convincing as father and son. Regnier is excellent too, radiating suavity mingled with sadness, while Guillon is only slightly less impressive as the unfulfilled younger brother. The script is notable for its clean, crisp dialogue–the only miscalculations involve the occasional monologues that Patrick delivers, stand-up style, and a final confrontation between Maurice and Jean-Luc that breaks out into violence–and Fontaine directs with studied reticence, allowing the silences to convey more than the conversations. Jean-Marc Fabre’s cinematography and Jocelyn Pook’s score add to the atmosphere of bleakness beneath the surface.

The result is the kind of rarefied French film that won’t appeal to the multitudes but which–if you give yourself over to its moody, elliptical style–you might find much more compelling than the overtly dramatic, explicit fare that Hollywood usually offers.