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Nightcap(Merci pour le chocolat)

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France, Switzerland · 2000
1h 39m
Director Claude Chabrol
Starring Isabelle Huppert, Jacques Dutronc, Anna Mouglalis, Rodolphe Pauly
Genre Crime, Drama, Mystery, Thriller

In this clever mystery, Mika, the head of a chocolate company, and Andre, a concert pianist, live an ideal life in Lausanne, Switzerland. As Mika attempts to prepare her special nightly hot chocolate, her bliss is threatened by difficult questions and deep tensions when Jeanne, a mysterious young woman, arrives at their home.

Stream Nightcap

What are people saying?

What are critics saying?

80

New Times (L.A.) by Andy Klein

The film is a masterpiece of nuance and characterization, marred only by an inexplicable, utterly distracting blunder at the very end.

80

L.A. Weekly by Ella Taylor

The story proceeds, by minuscule tonal shifts and barely perceptible changes in the atmospheric temperature, from touches of ghoulish comedy -- to the creepy stillness of death that pervades the house.

90

Village Voice by J. Hoberman

Self-contained, enigmatic, illuminated from within, Huppert banks a performance that pays dividends throughout the film.

75

New York Daily News by Jami Bernard

Not since Cary Grant offered Joan Fontaine a gleaming glass of milk has a bedtime toddy looked as suspicious as it does in Claude Chabrol's wittily enigmatic Merci pour le chocolat.

60

TV Guide Magazine by Ken Fox

The film is ridiculously overplotted, and very little of the plot serves any purpose other than to motivate what you can pretty well guess is going to happen from the outset.

88

New York Post by Lou Lumenick

Like some of Hitchcock's films, the story - adapted from a novel by Charlotte Armstrong, an American mystery writer of the '40s and '50s - can be accused of stretching credibility and coincidence almost to the breaking point.

100

Chicago Tribune by Michael Wilmington

It is a movie about the gradual erosion of life's seeming certainties, and it's also about the destructive immorality that may lie beneath the most exquisitely composed veneer. As we watch "Chocolat," this great director and his great actress, Huppert, convince us: Evil is.

80

Time by Richard Schickel

Occasionally succumbs to Mika's legato rhythms, but it is more often a sly, subtle comedy about the oh-so-gentle art of murder.

80

The A.V. Club by Scott Tobias

Chabrol handles the upended family dynamic beautifully until the final third, when a wildly implausible sequence of events lessens the suspense just as he should be turning the screws.

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