"Qui a tué Bambi?" has big qualities:gore and special effects are almost absent and the story is wrapped in an agonizing atmosphere .
The director knows his classics: in turn ,I've thought of Henri-Georges Clouzot's "la Prisonnière" (the relationship between the doctor and the nurse which verges on sado-masochism) ,of Crichton' s "Coma" (there's an hospital where patients disappear,and one of their surgeons' behavior is dubious),of Polanski's "Rosemary's baby " (a character is in the middle of a strange conspiracy ,nobody believes her,but there's more: the jewel the doctor gives to the nurse strongly recalls the one Minnie Castevet gives to Rosemary;and in both movies the jewels had belonged to another woman (dead) before)and of "Carnival of souls" (the car wreck).
The director adds hints at Walt Disney's "Bambi" as well;the title is no misnomer: "Your mother will not come round anymore" " Your legs are giving way under you,just like Bambi" .
Perhaps the best ideas of the script are the "games" subject: an innocent game the nurses play in the corridor where they tell if a person is a man or a woman by the way they look at their fingernails; wicked games such as the consonants and the vowels one.You may remember in "the crying game" the story called "the scorpion and the frog" which comes back later at the end of that Jordan film . "The consonants and the vowels " game plays the same part here.It's downright disturbing when the nurse plays it for the first time in a hellish nightclub.The second time,not only the heroine but also the audience can play too.
The two leads are convincing and they never overplay ,which is a tour de force in such a context.One can regret the last minute .It comes almost as an anticlimax.
It's a good thriller.The director knows his classics.
