THE STONE COUNCIL

Laura lives alone with her adopted son Liu-San, a seven-year-old child of Mongolian origin who is about to turn seven. In the days leading up to his birthday, a strange circular birthmark appears on the child's left shoulder, and he also begins to have nightmares that strangely are the same ones his mother has. One night, mother and son have a bad car accident; Laura gets away with a few bruises, and Liu-San ends up in a coma, but, as if by a miracle, the child recovers and heals from all his injuries within a few days. On his birthday, Liu-San is kidnapped and taken to his country of origin to be sacrificed by a sect that has noticed his particular gifts. Laura sets out to find him. Jean-Christophe Grangé has already provided the French cinema with material for the production of major box office successes, think of "The Purple Rivers" and "The Wolf Empire," both adapted from two of his novels, as well as the screenplay for the alchemical thriller "Vidocq." The last film adapted from a best-seller by Grangé is "The Chosen One," an unfortunate title given by the Italian distributor to "Le concile de pierre," a mysticizing thriller permeated with the supernatural that will make the happiness of those who have insomnia problems. "The Chosen One" has two major problems: excessive narrative slowness and an unnecessarily complicated story. The slowness that weighs down the viewing of the film is a serious flaw for a genre film, especially if it is a film rich in events that has all the potential to adequately engage the viewer. This heaviness is certainly accentuated by a worrying underlying seriousness that seems to want to elevate the film to something more ambitious than a simple supernatural thriller and instead ends up making some passages of the plot ridiculous. The sense of oppression and fatigue that one feels while watching "The Chosen One" is then to be attributed to a botched screenplay by Stéphane Cabel ("The Pact of the Wolves") and Guillaume Nicloux. The problem probably lies in wanting to condense a novel of over 400 pages (the novel in Italy was printed with the title "The Council of Stone") into just 90 minutes of film without wanting to give up any of the numerous twists that the intricate plot possesses. And so you have a hodgepodge in which government experiments, secret military weapons, mystical prophecies, miraculous powers, diabolical sects, and animal men are thrown together without any logical criterion, with such disorder and inability as to make even the understanding of all the film's passages complicated. To its advantage, "The Chosen One" still has a certain stylistic elegance, a characteristic of many great French productions, and a good performance by Monica Bellucci, very attractive even without makeup and short hair, particularly credible in the role of the worried mother, whose character has also been improved compared to the somewhat too gritty one in the novel. Alongside Bellucci, we find a rather uninvolved Catherine Deneuve and a disoriented Moritz Bleibtreu ("The Experiment"; "Speed Racer"). Decent digital special effects. In conclusion, "The Chosen One" is a boring, poorly written film and incapable of managing a story too complicated to be told in a short time. A clear example of how not to make a thriller.