In the first five minutes of French sci-fi action-thriller Chrysalis, the audience is shown the dead body of one woman, the violent murder of another and an accident that looks to have claimed the life of a third. And soon after the opening credits, this dark offering’s viewers are given yet another dead female, this one in a state of some decomposition to boot. It’s as if first-time director Julien Leclercq – who co-scripted this technically impressive film with Franck Philippon, Nicholas Peufaillit and Aude Py – was determined to quickly establish that it is no namby-pamby Hollywood-style work (where women and children – especially those near and dear to the main characters – are almost never shown being killed or even looking all that bad).

Set in the Paris of a not-so-distant future (with cold, grey and metallic aesthetics), Chrysalis has as its hero David Hoffman (Albert Dupontel), a member of the EUROPOL (European Police) force, hot on the trail of Dimitri Nikolov (Alain Figlarz), a Bulgarian Secret Service agent turned bad guy who has left a trail of murder victims, and at least one brain-damaged old man, in his wake.

After the brute kills Hoffman’s professional partner – who also happens to be the policeman’s wife – in front of the hard-boiled cop’s very eyes, Hoffman momentarily appears in danger of sinking into the depths of despair. But when presented with the sad sight of yet another of the villain’s innocent victims, the policeman realizes that what he really wants to do is bring this dangerous fellon to justice.

Paying scant attention to his new partner, the attractive Marie Becker (Marie Guillard), Hoffman soon manages to apprehend – and then slay – Nikolov, only to belatedly find out that it was not the Nikolov who killed his wife but that burly figure’s identical twin. A pair of look-alikes also figure in the unnecessarily convoluted Chrysalis’s other main story, which takes a while to reveal its connection to Hoffman’s tale and, upon doing so, threatens to really strain one’s sense of credulity.

For the moment, suffice it to share that the second story revolves around a heart surgeon, Prof Bruegen (Marthe Keller), and her teenage daughter Manon (Mélanie Thierry), who a major car crash seems to have left with an impaired memory but miraculously few physical scars. But while everything appears fine on the surface, at least initially, enough is soon revealed to get one suspecting things are not as they seem in her life and cutting-edge medical facility.

As I viewed this film, one question that kept on popping up in my head was why, in such a futuristic society, are bone-crunching fist fights still the preferred way to settle matters between men? For although guns (and a few sundry other weapons) are brandished, Hoffman and Nikolov display a marked tendency to brutally pummel each other with their bare hands. And while all this can make for entertainingly visceral theatre, ultimately it had me feeling that this homage to Georges Franju’s 1960 Les Yeux Sans Visage (Eyes Without A Face) is one of those movies in which logic, believability and genuine substance are sacrificed in favour of stunning or sleek visuals and a surprise plot twist too many.

Yvonne Teh