C H R Y S A L I S (French)
The Story:
Set in Paris, in year 2020. State-of-the-art surgeon Professor Brugen is in a horrific crash which kills her daughter Manon. Meanwhile, hard-nosed, no-nonsense cop David Hoffman (Albert Dupontel) and his police partner/wife Sarah (Smadi Wolfman) are in a gun fight with Bulgarian secret service renegade Dimitri Nicolov (Alain Figlarz). Nicolov sadistically kills Hoffman's wife and escapes.
Hoffman tracks down Nicolov and, after a chase, he is arrested. But Nicolov tries to escape custody by grabbing - and threatening to kill - Hoffman's new partner Marie Becker (Marie Guillard). He's coldly shot dead by Hoffman, who hands in his badge and leaves the force.
Back at his apartment, Hoffman is attacked by the man he thought he'd just shot dead. He's captured and subjected to the Chrysalis machine which can erase, transfer and manipulate memories. It turns out Nicolov has stolen the machine, and is using Professor Brugen's hi-tech skills to operate it. Hoffman is freed on to the street with his recent memory a blank slate. Becker teams up with Hoffman to investigate his memory loss and find Nicolov.
We learn that Brugen has created a duplicate of her dead daughter Manon using an abducted girl called Elena, whose face has been surgically changed to look like Manon and whose own memories have been removed and are being replaced with those of Manon. The crash-mangled body of Manon is being kept alive by Professor Brugen as a mere shell from which she is stripping her daughter's identity to put into Elena. Meanwhile, the memory transfer into Elena is slow and imperfect and she feels unease with her identity.
Hoffman's investigation takes him all the way to the surgeon and clinic run by the iron hand of technology where all is not as it seems.
Starring:
Marthe Keller, Melanie Thierry, Albert Dupontel, Marie Guillard, Manon Chevallier
Directed By:
Julien Leclercq
Release:
2007
Watch the Trailer:
