It has premiered on Movistar + an extraordinary suspense thriller, so dark that it becomes disturbingabout the investigation of a black box of a mysterious plane crash that takes up the great conspiracy cinema and mystery recordings such as ‘Impact’ (Blow Out, 1981) by Brian de Palma or ‘The conversation’ (The Conversation, 1974) by Francis Ford Coppola, only in the unlikely world of audio recovered from crashed planes.
If you have ever had the doubt of what the black boxes of the airplanes contain and why these are so important in determining the circumstances that lead to disaster, this is his film. The story is about Mathieu (Pierre Niney), a young black box analyst tasked with examining the recorded remains of a tragic crash that killed 300 passengers in what appears to be a terrorist attack aboard a new airliner, but when the reasons suggested by the record do not quite fit with the hypothesis, the problems begin.
Added to this is that a senior colleague (Olivier Rabourdin) has mysteriously disappeared after commissioning the job, which generates Mathieu an obsession to discover the truth as he deals with a request to quickly clean up the inconsistencies in the case from his stalwart supervisor (André Dussollier), the procrastination of a nearby airline executive (Sébastien Pouderoux), and additional pressure from his own partner, Noemie (Lou de Laâge), responsible for certifying the aircraft, including the one for the flight in question.
The development handles several keys to De Palma’s film, but ‘Black Box’ dives into the corporate ins and outs of high-altitude accident companiesinstead of automobiles. Instead of Travolta, here Niney, the actor who played Yves Saint Laurent, is shown as a stuffy, borderline autistic worker at the Bureau of Research and Analysis, so intense and obsessive that he’s almost untreatable. Mathieu wanted to be a pilot, but the sight of him cut short that career.
an inconvenient truth
Therefore, he tries to overcompensate by being better at his job, something that nobody needs him to be, as in all positions that can uncover inconvenient truths, especially for the head of BEA (André Dussollier), rather reluctant to air the problems. from a commercial airline accident. The dilemma is that if it really was a terrorist attack, it could lead to a war, even though the explanation is more convenient for corporate interests than demonstrate a malfunction of the instrument.
‘Black Box’ converts the steps and processes to autopsy audio files into something exciting, showing the minutiae to understand how sounds without context can hold the key to many situations and pertinent information, although ultimately, it is a human being who must come to a conclusion. But the movie really gets exciting when his boss disappears and he starts poking around in his own spare time.
Everything indicates that there are pilots who do not receive the training they need to use the new automatic flight system, which appears to have been lifted directly from the actual case of Boeing’s 737 MAX aircraftwhich were grounded after two high-profile accidents: Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, which can be followed in the Netflix documentary ‘Downfall: The Case Against Boeing’ (Downfall: The Case Against Boeing, 2022), but the one in the film is even more terrifying, as domestic aviation politics add an extra layer of suspense.
A very sinister mystery
There are legal and political reasons why actual conspiracy cases like ‘Silkwood’ are not as prevalent today, but there are a palpable and suffocating corporate pressure that is all too believable enough to take it as something completely fictional. However, thanks to the distance, the film enjoys an extraordinary formal care, with photography drenched in pure blacks and cold tones that close in on the protagonist from its impressive opening sequence shot to the threatening darkness of its final stretch.
The sound design of the crucial black box recording is also set in a very powerful and distinctive way to drive the narrative as a whole, reminiscent of Roman Polanski’s ‘The Ghost Writer’ (2010) in its ability to make the threat disappear and make it intangible, omnipresent and dangerous. One thinks of the power that large companies that manage millions can have and quickly thinks that it is not something unthinkable.
‘Black Box’ is a fascinating descent into the rabbit hole shot with an oppressive tone and an aseptic and dark staging, which intoxicates its mystery with an invisible danger around technology that would caress science fiction… if not was already possible today. Its development absorbs thanks to a development of “follow the clues” that is distinguished from other films of corporate or political imposture thanks to a claustrophobic tone, even with some escapes to psychological horror, which manages to turn the world of airlines into something sinister.