French filmmaker Pascal Thomas has a thing about Agatha Christie. "L'heure zero (Toward Zero)" is his second adaptation of a mystery by the "Queen of Crime" following "Mon petit doigt ma dit . . . (By the Pricking of My Thumbs . . .)," and he re-creates the Christie microcosm, as before, with the earnest dedication of an enthused fan.
The setting is gorgeous, the cast stellar — classic French actress Danielle Darrieux and Catherine Deneuve's daughter Chiara Mastroianni in the same frame! — and the nitty-gritty side of homicide is carefully filtered, leaving the audience free to savor the full flavor of Christie's world: elegant and bubbly with an aftertaste of brutishness.
Though the English author sometimes wrote of street-level goings-on, her novels deal mostly with the privileged and wealthy. And if her characters happened to be a less well-off than they had hoped to be, there was always some rich relation hovering nearby with a convenient will and "Murder Victim" stamped on their forehead.