aGLIFF Preview: Room of Death

In addition to the other great films playing tonight at aGLIFF (we also heartily recommend Austinite P.J. Raval's sex change doc Trinidad), the folks at Fantastic Fest will co-present a screening of the French thriller Room of Death (Le Chambre des morts).

Equal parts Shallow Grave and Silence of the Lambs, the film follows a rookie cop named Lucie as she tracks a demented kidnapper whose latest victim has precious few days to live. Things get complicated when a pair of down-on-their-luck friends accidentally kill a man on his way to deliver a ransom to the kidnapper, and they decide to hide the body and keep the money for themselves (predictably, the kidnapper doesn't like this at all).

With enough suspense to keep things interesting, and a surprisingly restrained amount of gore for a movie called "Room of Death", Director Alfred Lot has crafted a dark but entertaining first feature--and one of the few suspense thrillers that we know of to feature a gay villain (the most notable being the aforementioned Silence of the Lambs).