LEMMING

Year: 2005
USA: Strand Releasing
UK: Artificial Eye
Cast: Laurent Lucas, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Charlotte Rampling, Andre Dussollier, Jacques Bonnaffe, Veronique Affholder, Michel Cassagne, Florence Desille, Emmanuel Gayet, Felix Gonazles, Nicolas Jouhet, Fabrice Robert
Director: Dominik Moll
Country: France
Language: French (English subtitles)
USA & UK: 129 mins
UK Certificate: 15 contains strong language, moderate violence and suicide
USA Release Date: 19 May 2006 (Limited Release - New York)
UK Release Date: 28 April 2006
US Distributor
UK Distributor
French Distributor

Synopsis

After five years, LEMMING marks the eagerly awaited follow-up to Dominik Moll's hugely successful thriller, HARRY, HE'S HERE TO HELP. Dominik Molls' LEMMING provides another tension-filled, off-kilter riff on the interactions of two couples.

Alain Getty (Laurent Lucas), a brilliant, young engineer, and his wife Benedicte having recently arrived in a new town following Alain's work transfer, invite Alain's boss Richard Pollock (Andre Dussollier) and his wife Alice (Charlotte Rampling) to dinner one evening. However the difference between the two couples couldn't be more extreme: on one hand the young model couple, on the other, a pair corroded by hate and resentment. The encounter does not leave the young couple's harmony unscathed. Then the discovery of a mysterious not-quite-dead rodent blocking the waste pipe of their kitchen sink does nothing to help and instead marks the descent of their once perfect life into pandemonium.

This is a surreal, darkly comic and disturbing psychological thriller with Moll again working with Laurent Lucas (the husband in HARRY HE'S HERE TO HELP). Charlotte Rampling gives an extraordinary performance, as the unnerving visitor.

Moll's influences include the surrealist painters Giorgio de Chirico and Henri Magritte.

"To some degree, the lemming symbolises the grain of sand which gets into the machine and throws it off kilter. It's a foreshadowing of the weirdness that is to come. But the weirdness arises where it is least expected." - Dominik Moll

Dominik Moll was born in Buhl (West Germany), 1962. While studying at the City University of New York and later at the IDHEC in Paris, he made six short films including: THE BLANKET (1983), MEDICAL VISIT (1985), and THE GYNAECOLOGIST AND HIS SECRETARY (1987). In 1992 -3, he wrote and directed his first feature film, INTIMACY, distributed in 1994 by Diaphana. Moll's second feature HARRY, HE'S HERE TO HELP, released in 2000, was the surprise hit at Cannes, going on to receive worldwide acclaim.