A tout prix
2018 · 15m
Directed by Yann Danh
Genres: crime, dark comedy, thriller
Tones: darkly comic, provocative, tense
Three former employees take their ex-CEO hostage over a company relocation and his golden parachute; when the ransom is rejected, they prove how far they can go.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A hostage thriller that flips the script so the powerless become the threat—rejecting ransom and forcing a CEO to reckon with actual consequences is exactly the kind of premise that makes consensus audiences squirm, and Danh leans into that discomfort rather than backing away from it.
Danh's restraint in the staging and pacing situates this within a lineage of French political thrillers that treat class violence as formal inevitability; the economy of the 15-minute runtime becomes a compositional choice that mirrors the characters' own confinement.
The pivot from kidnapping-as-punchline to kidnapping-as-actual-reckoning hinges on a single tonal choice in the second act—when the ransom gets rejected—and everything after that operates under a different moral gravity, which Danh executes with minimal exposition and maximum pressure.
Reviews
When their ransom demand is rejected, they have no choice but to prove how far they can go.