Roman Polanski makes this account of doctor Harrison Ford looking for his missing wife in an antagonistic Paris deeply disturbing. When Ford's wife Betty Buckley - accompanying him to a medical conference - disappears from their hotel suite, reality becomes nightmare and solid citizen Ford disintegrates, resorting to increasingly desperate measures to find her. Emmanuelle Seigner, as a punkish free spirit, is a major flaw, but as a whole the movie - a variation on the Dirk Bogarde 1950 film So Long at the Fair - is a bad dream of surreal, often funny, conviction. It's a Hitchcockian idea, but Polanski embellishes it with his own baleful theme about the uneasy nature of human existence, which is given added tension by Ennio Morricone's dramatic score.

The wife of an American doctor suddenly vanishes in Paris. To find her, he navigates a puzzling web of language, locale, laissez-faire cops, triplicate-form filling bureaucrats and a defiant, mysterious waif who knows more than she tells.