To the many supervisors and peers with whom she marginally connects during her myriad office temp assignments, thirtysomething Christine Blanc (Sasha Andres) is an unassuming figure, dispatching the tasks set before her efficiently if unremarkably. The personality that emerges once she clocks out, however, is a lot more disquieting. Her interpersonal skills are so astonishingly stunted that the very notion of sharing a lunch table makes her quake. She's reliant on eavesdropping on strangers in order to have the fodder to participate in casual conversation, and she persists in maintaining the fiction of having a steady boyfriend to even her parents.
She does, however, have admiration for Patricia (Catherine Mouchet), the employment agency counselor who doles out her contracts. Seizing on a weak moment by the previously somewhat frosty Patricia, Christine mounts a campaign to insinuate herself in her life, even going so far as to elaborately feign shared interests in Patricia's pet indulgences, such as owl knickknacks. The stage is set for tragedy once Patricia begins to reciprocate the friendship, however. Christine can't deal with not being able to set all the parameters; Patricia invites her to join her at a public pool, and Christine's response to an innocent dunking leads to a shocking and brutal end.
While hoping to avoid discovery, Christine's life takes an unaccustomed turn, as her current provisional employer becomes sufficiently impressed with her performance to ask her to stay on. Christine adapts to acceptance within a corporate culture with disconcerting speed; within weeks, she's moved in with a male co-worker (Eric Caravaca), and she's swiftly moved into middle management, where her predatory skills have practical application. She still finds time to guide a needy secretary to an untimely demise. All the while, the police investigation regarding Patricia's fate continues to narrow, with the lead detective (Carlo Brandt) unable to conceal a growing infatuation with Christine. Concurrently, a young co-worker is being less than coy about the suspicions he's harboring.
It's unclear whether Alnoy is trying to say that Christine's behavior is a product of France's temp culture, or she was simply born nuts. Aided immeasurably by the creepy blank-slate performance from Andres, She's One Of Us is enormously effective over its first half. Between the improbability of Christine's subsequent transformation, and the narrative's slide into overt pretentiousness as it heads toward resolution, what could have been a very well-rendered chiller with an interesting social subtext winds up being no more than just okay.
The mastering job on She's One Of Us, presented in its original 1.85:1 aspect ratio, is very clean, and the Dolby 5.1 audio track does service to Alnoy's disturbingly effective use of sound. The extras package includes Alnoy's five-minute short Nos Enfants, a 35-minute "making-of" documentary that, sorry to say, is more opaque than informative, and a dozen deleted scenes.
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by Jay S. Steinberg
