A successful novelist and restrained actor's director, Carrére makes the transformation of a silly marital argument into a cosmic upheaval look easy, and profound as well.

No matter how serious it becomes, however, La Moustache never forsakes an underlying attitude of high-style playfulness that recalls Hitchcock's cat-and-mouse romantic thrillers.

Unlike, say, David Cronenberg, who manages to establish a crucial, critical distance between his audience and his schizophrenic protagonist in his adaptation of Patrick McGrath's similarly themed "Spider," Carrere re-creates the insane mind through his camera, and diffuses his point about subjective experience by inadvertently raising questions about truth and the movies.

Vincent Lindon, one of France's leading actors, is super as Marc, a man on a downward spiral into insanity. And Emmanuelle Devos is comforting as Marc's loving wife.

La Moustache recalls the "everyday suspense" films of Roman Polanski and the existential woe of Michelangelo Antonioni, but it isn't as strange or penetrating as the former, or as artfully shot as the latter.

This narrative feature debut by Emmanuel Carrere, based on his own novel, is deliberately open-ended, but however one interprets the outcome, the film reminds us how fragile intimacy is.

Viewers who like their conclusions tidy may rebel, but those who relish outstanding performances in the service of an intriguing idea will be entertained.

The pleasure of La Moustache is that it doesn't feel the need to explain itself at every turn. Part absurdist comedy about the institution of marriage, part paranoid Kafkaesque fantasy, it's a minor-key reverie on the way our own lives can sometimes feel alien to us.

The big shave is the starting point for a clever, if somewhat too clever, film from French critic, novelist and documentarian Emmanuel Carrere. La Moustache could be clipped down to Franz Kafka-meets-Jerry Seinfeld, where a whole slew of absurd petite calamities befall our everyday hero, triggered by his trim.

Have Marc's friends tricked him with a conspiracy of silence, or was that mustache a growth only in his mind? The filmmaker has said there is no intended meaning to any of this, so search for it for your own amusement.