The Wolf's Call

Chanteraide's job on a French submarine is to listen. As a sonar operator who can identify anything in the water, he is called a golden ear. One mistake on one mission starts a chain of events, and the film opens out into a nuclear crisis. Director Antonin Baudry did not come from cinema. He had been an adviser and speechwriter to former French foreign minister Dominique de Villepin, and the geopolitics in the film come out of that. Baudry spent a month observing actual French naval submarines and was explicit about his aim: he wanted to draw on real life rather than adopt the codes of a preestablished genre. Some scenes were shot aboard real submarines, and the result has a texture unlike American submarine films. François Civil plays the sonar operator and Omar Sy the commanding officer. It opened at number five in France and sold over 1.5 million tickets. Who it is for: viewers who like submarine tension and technical detail, in a film where sound matters more than image. Who it is not for: anyone unwilling to follow a genre shift. It moves from a tight psychological thriller into a wide action picture.