Love Crime (2010)

Love Crime is a 2010 psychological suspense thriller starring Ludivine Sagnier and Kristin Scott Thomas. It is the last film directed by Alain Corneau, and was released posthumously after the director's death from cancer.

Set in and around Paris, France, the story revolves around two women who work in a multinational corporation. Christine (Scott-Thomas) is an experienced, ruthless, and emotionally sadistic business executive who enjoys using and betraying people for her own twisted enjoyment. Isabelle (Sagnier) is Christine's young, ambitious and intelligent administrative assistant who regularly suffers from professional and personal humiliations at the hands of Christine who takes credit for her business ideas as well as makes implied threats against her without actually confronting her directly.

A subplot revolves around Christine's boyfriend, Philippe, who is cheating on her with Isabelle at the same time. When Christine discovers accounting irregularties in Philippe's business accounts with the firm, Christine threatens him instead of reporting him, hoping to use him too to her own advantage.

Midway through the movie, Isabelle, after suffering one-too-many implied threats and humiliations by Christine, murders her by staging a break-in at Christine's suburban house and stabs her to death. Isabelle then implicates herself in the crime, a seeming sign of a nervous breakdown, when she allows herself to get arrested and incarcerated. At this point, the imprisoned Isabelle embarks on a quest to prove her innocence of a murder that she actually committed, but her defense may prove to be even more difficult than she anticipated due to her history with Christine and of the circumstantual evidence that Isabelle herself planted.

The film opened in the U.S. in September 2011 in limited release, and is slowly making its way around the U.S. The dialogue is in both French and English – the English being spoken only when the characters have to deal with foreign clients who do not speak French.