With A Friend Like Harry

At the outset of Dominik Moll's, 'With A Friend Like Harry', it would be easy to anticipate a by-the-books, slasher/suspense flick. Traveling to the French countryside with his cranky family, Michel finds himself being stared at in a reststop restroom. The odd onlooker is Harry, a mysteriously wealthy and calmly charamatic schoolmate of Michel's who - despite the fact that Michel cannot remember him at all - seems to remember everything about Michel. Against all common logic, Michel lets Harry and his jiggly young girlfriend accompany the family to their countryside home.
Such a familiar start so often gives way to a familiar genre: the group ends up at the isolated house. Harry's dark side unravels. Harry immobilzes the cars and cuts the power. Etc, etc. But as the couples sit down to dinner that night, we start to see that Michel had incidentally moved Harry years ago with his sophmoric high school stories. In one of the film's funnier scenes, Harry recites for the table - word for word,- one of Michel's unfinished short stories called 'The Flying Monkeys'. As Harry recites the story with a look of unvarnished pride, Michel looks on with utter disbelief while his wife can barely contain her amusement at how sophomoric it is. Harry's cool demeanor and 'good guy' mystique immediately disappear when Harry's wife calls the story"funny". It's here that Harry's facade breaks and his motivations are subtly revealed.
What follows is more reminiscent of 'The Talented Mr. Ripley' than 'Friday The 13th'. Harry's enthusiasm over Michel's...talent, and his desire to be closer to him than anyone, leads him to kill anyone who may be a source of discomfort or distraction in Michel's life. But the real cleverness to the film is how Harry comes to persuade Michel that he needs Harry, and that finishing 'The Flying Monkeys' is the best way to deal with the loss that Harry is secretly responsible for. For all the suspense that seems destined to lead up to a harrowing climax, the film's resolution is so refreshingly quick and easy that it feels our sense of anticipation has been beautifully manipulated. The ending is so sun-soaked and happy that we can't help smirking. For all it's terror and nail-biting suspense, 'With A Friend Like Harry' is more a film about how one man's life was saved.