Product Description

Heartbeat Detector is a riveting mystery of blackmail and intrigue, where the long-buried secrets of high-powered corporate executives threaten to bring them down.
Mathieu Amalric (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) is Simon Kessler, a psychologist working for multinational petrochemical corporation SC Farb. Simon's tenacious, rigorous and resilient. His successful role in a corporate downsizing proved to SC Farb's director Karl Rose that Simon is perfect for a delicate situation concerning the firm's head office in Germany. The Germans want a report on CEO Mathias Jüst, who they fear is unfit for his role. The sinister Mr. Rose wants Simon to secretly investigate Jüst.

But Jüst is no fool. Aware of Simon's toiling for Rose, Jüst toys with Simon before challenging him with confidential and compromising information that hints at unspeakable crimes against humanity reaching back to WWII.

Following a dubious suicide attempt, Jüst presents Simon with anonymous letters written to him implicating both Jüst and SC Farb for their allegiance to the Third Reich. When Simon receives similar letters, he digs deeper into the tangled web before him. Simon follows a clue and sets off for an impromptu meeting where blackmail, betrayal, murder and the hierarchy of SC Farb's repressed past will all come to light.

Special Features:
- Theatrical trailer
- 5.1 soundtrack
- Enhanced for 16x9 Tvs
- Optional English subtitles
- Scene selections

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #48344 in DVD
• Released on: 2008-07-22
• Rating: Unrated
• Aspect ratio: 1.77:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Color, Dolby, DVD, NTSC, Surround Sound, Widescreen
• Original language: French
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 141 minutes

Review
A chilling corporate thriller with an intriguing mystery on the surface and a deeply troubling idea at its dark core. --Ken Fox, TV Guide

Review
It has haunted me ever since I saw it. --Andrew Sarris, The New York Observer

Review
A STUNNER! Bold brilliance. Riveting and relentless. --Christopher Null, Filmcritic.com

Customer Reviews

A very poetic movie about our sociaty.
This film paints a metaphor by constructing a story about music (as the human soul) in a big corporation (our society). And also proves one assertion that the recalling memories of the old sins never leave human being even if he is only a witness. So there is a Parisian psychologist (Mathieu Amalric) who is to follow one human fate only to discover the pain added on another pain and so on... He is on the way to resolve his own illusions or maybe only to make the first step to do so. We don't know a lot because some things in life happen in a darkness...

A film worth seeing
A film about the goings-on within a corporation from the perspective of the corporate psychologist, Kessler (Amalric). The corporate psychologist is responsible for helping to decide whom to hire, fire or reassign. It is revealed that Kessler's private life is in disarray; his relationship with the woman he loves is strained and he is having an affair with an aggressive woman at the office. Production is down and the CEOs are looking for ways to change that. Kessler wants to use music and bonding experiences to help increase production. He is also given the task of evaluating an executive, Juest (Lonsdale) who's behavior has become erratic. While investigating the profoundly sad Juest, Kessler finds there are terrible secrets involving certain corporate employees that go back to World War II. At one point Kessler reads a report written during World War II and it is a long description of the outfitting of trucks to kill their passengers with tailpipe exhaust. The report is written in a style that is absolutely chilling; it is the most effective scene in the film. After reading the report, Kessler sits on his bed and sobs. Later Kessler sets out to find the man who mailed anonymous letters to the corporate offices; it is a former employee, Neumann. Neumann was fired from the corporation and he's bitter about it. He compares Kessler's job of getting rid of non-productive employees with the Nazi extermination of undesirables. He compares the cold language used in the truck report to the cold language used by corporations regarding their employees.
Although the film was interesting to watch, it meandered a bit too much and I felt the scenes were not connected to each other very well. I think the film needed some additional editing, although perhaps some things are simply lost in translation. The performances of the actors were very good.

A potentially interesting movie, undone by the self-aware earnestness of the director and writer
Here's a movie with a serious theme, undone by the earnestness of the director and writer. We know how serious the theme is because it involves Nazi death camps, and not just as a reminder of what humans are capable of, but as an odd metaphor for humanity's current business conditions.

"Did you know," says one character, "we don't have poor people anymore? Only people on modest incomes. We no longer talk of "issues," such as social issues, but "problems" that our specialists split up into a series of technical details. For each one, they'll find the optimum solution."

That may or may not be true, depending on one's own social enthusiasms, but Nicolas Klotz, the director, and Elisabeth Perceval, the screenwriter, seem to be making the case that corporate downsizing is the moral equivalent of Nazi extermination actions. The parallel is not only grotesquely naive, but thickheadedly trivializes some of humanity's worst atrocities. One has to admire, and I mean this seriously, their earnestness, but their earnestness leads them into the fatal flaw of some artists: That their passion for social justice equates as artistic talent.

The Human Question (the English title, Heartbeat Detector, is confusing) gives us a good start. A corporate psychologist at SCFarb, a giant German company with a major Parisian subsidiary, is called upon by Karl Rose, the firm's deputy manager, to secretly report on the mental health of SCFarb's head, Mathias Just (Michael Lonsdale). Our man, Simon Kessler (Mathieu Amalric), is told that Just has been behaving erratically. Simon is given this assignment because of how effective and dedicated he had been in his role during a major downsizing. Simon gets more than he bargained for. He discovers something called the Farb Quartet, which several years ago played for employees. Just was the violinist. This gives him cover to meet with and evaluate Just to discuss the possibility of a Farb employee symphony. After two meetings and a visit to Just's home, it's clear to Simon that Just is exhausted, in the midst of some sort of crises and is racked by a deep sadness. And then Just tells Simon he knows all about Simon's assignment...and that Karl Rose was a child from a Nazi program to increase the numbers of Aryan children. Then there are the letters Just gives him, letters that talk about the role of Just's father at a death camp. This is followed by anonymous letters Simon begins to get which artfully combine sections of Simons recommendations for downsizing and old Nazi instructions for killing people.

And on it goes for nearly two-and-a-half hours. There is no drama to speak of, just lots of long takes, long monologues and long scenes. There are lots of secondary issues that move around without resolution. It takes 80 minutes to get to where tension in Simon's assignment starts to build and where we think there might be something wrong in the relationship between Just and Rose. It takes 95 minutes to get to the point of the movie...activities at Nazi extermination camps and the lack of emotion about how people are treated today. "The business world is unforgiving," says Just. "How do you reconcile `the human factor' with the company's need to make money?"

Some viewers become angry or sarcastic when faced with movies like this. My emotions are sadness and boredom. Sadness because the serious intent of the movie's creators exceeds their abilities. Boredom, because no matter how earnest the intent of a movie, a movie's first responsibility is to engage the viewer at some meaningful level, even if that level is based only on technique. For me, Heartbeat Detector missed that requirement, especially at the level of technique. But in an unintended bit of irony, we also figure out that being a company psychologist must require all the supple morals of a physician who assists in "robust" interrogations of prisoners. Michael Lonsdale, however, is a fine actor. It was almost worth seeing the movie to watch him.

The DVD is bare bones. It looks just fine except for some of the nighttime scenes when little can be made out.