If there’s one thing that Tell No One (French title: Ne le dis à personne) gets right above all else, it’s that it always leaves you guessing. And this is the most important part, isn’t it? If you know where the thriller is going, the film is somewhat less than thrilling. Written for the screen and directed by Guillaume Canet (Joyeux Noël), Tell No One is a guessing game where in you don’t know the goals, or the rules, or even precisely who the players are. At times running fluid like The Bourne Identity and at others seeming like a John Grisham novel only, you know, better, this movie is a compelling ride to say the least.

Alex and Margot Beck (François Cluzet and Marie-Josée Croze) are childhood sweethearts that eventually married. While on a holiday, she’s seemingly murdered while he’s knock unconscious and put in a coma for three days. I say “seemingly” because on the anniversary of her “death” eight years later, Alex receives an e-mail message from his wife, a steaming video showing her alive and well. The end of the message says “Ne le dis à personne” or “tell no one.” But Alex is not the only one looking for answers. A group of criminal ne’er-do-wells are tossing the town trying to find her and are framing Alex for a related murder to send him up.

So is Margot alive, or isn’t she? And just what the heck did she do to make her fake her own death (or not) and return exactly eight years to the day? Truthfully, I wasn’t even sure if I knew the answer to that first one, and I typically like to think of myself as not entirely doltish. But more than that, Canet does an exquisite job of keeping you guessing without making you feel like he’s pulling developments out of thin air. The entire theatre was silent throughout the film, and I mean that there wasn’t even a hushed whisper; everyone was enraptured in the central mystery. And what’s still is that there’s really no big reveal either. With the mystery’s resolve, you ask yourself, is that it? But really, that’s all you need, anything else, to use the right phrase, would have been gauche.

And I wasn’t kidding about the Bourne remark either. There are a couple of action scenes that really rank on you adrenaline reflex; particularly a game of chicken across the freeway as Alex races to escape arrest so that he can be free to meet Margot in the park later. Primarily though, Canet owes a lot to Hitchcock in constructing the film’s temperament. Much of the Hitch’s best stuff had to do with regular people getting wrapped up in incredible circumstances combined with another one of Hitchcock’s favourite motifs: the Wrong Man. Cluzet is good at capturing that wide-eyed sense of disbelief, but he also seems to behave as anyone would under similar circumstances. Transporter fans will recognize François Berléand as Alex’s one, cop ally.

But to say anything more would be revealing too much. The fun is in the surprise and considering that I went into the film knowing almost nothing, it feels wrong to rob other people of that same advantage. I will say that in the end, the film provides a satisfying conclusion that won’t make you stop and go, “Huh?” It’s exceptionally well-made, suspenseful to boot and is possibly one of the best mystery films made in some time. The French are certainly making some exciting films these days that definitely play against the conventions you get in a lot of so-called “Hollywood Hogwash.” This one’s playing in art houses nationwide, but don’t do as the film suggestions, tell everyone you know.