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Chester MacFarland and his wife Colette, a glamorous American couple, arrive in Athens for sightseeing and happen to meet Rydal, a young, Greek-speaking American who is working as a tour guide. Rydal then is pressed to help Chester to hide the dead body of a private detective, leading to a dangerous journey of two men and a woman.
Rather than rise, this story cools off, fading away into unconvincing, accidental tragedy and an attempted emotional coda that feels more stapled on than woven in.
It's a classy looking movie for sure, and as pleasant a travelogue as Ripley was in its day. But Highsmith's psychological edge is absent for much of this and its shade of noir has suffered a serious bleaching in all that Mediterranean sun.
At a certain point, it's akin to reading a mediocre murder mystery. You finish it because you're too far in to quit, as opposed to actually caring how things wrap up.
This is a well-written and well-acted movie. The relationships in the triangle at the center of the film are not easily made convincing, but excellent acting makes it work. This is a very solid thriller with a lot of compelling emotional complexity.
Everything about The Two Faces of January is right, even as the events it describes - a couple's idyllic Grecian holiday, a charming American's adventures abroad - go terribly wrong.
Despite admirable moment-to-moment feats of actorly legerdemain from the primary and secondary cast alike, there's a deadly lack of heat. The costumes sing, the cigarettes fume. The simmer satisfies but never earns the tale's godless gloom.
[Hossein Amini's] polished storytelling carries this along, generally compensating for the mundane visuals and the actors' skilled but unmoored performances.