March 1, 2024

Teresa Reviews Meurtres du 3eme Type (2022)

Teresa Peschel Agatha Christie Movies, Teresa's Book and Movie Reviews

Teresa reviews Meurtres du 3eme Type (2022) and saw an alternative take on a familiar Agatha Christie trope.

Murders of the Third Kind; original story

Free version in French (no English subtitles) can be found on YouTube.

Agatha adjacent? 3 UFOs
Remove the modern trappings of alien abductions and you’ll recognize one of Agatha’s favorite ways to disguise a crime.

Quality of film: 3 UFOs
Fun, bouncy, comic, but way too much plot for its own good.

Also, follow Teresa’s discussion of these movie on her podcast.

Reviews Meurtres du 3eme Type (2021) commissaire legoff — Commissaire Legoff? More like Commissaire Jerk– never mind.

While I enjoyed watching Commissaire Legoff make a fool of himself trying to be cool and run an investigation, adding him meant not enough time was spent on the plot. This film has a fleet of UFOs worth of plot, and it all got short shrift.

What do UFOs have to do with Agatha? More than you’d think. The entire “aliens are visiting Earth and I want to believe” theme neatly substitutes for her normal go-to when covering up boring reality. Replace ghosts and the supernatural with aliens and you, too, can convince the credulous public that your murder spree is otherworldly, and you are an innocent bystander.

You’ve seen this, most notably in The Pale Horse (1961) and to a lesser degree in Dumb Witness (1937). She used similar misdirection in many of her mystery short stories. Basically, if the supernatural arises, you can safely assume it’s being used by the murderer to conceal his mundane crimes. Not always; in Christie land, anyone can be the murderer, anyone can be the victim, and sometimes ghosts really do go bump in the night.

But not here. To Coroner Blum’s eventual dismay, he’s forced to conclude that aliens didn’t visit Lille, murder the famous Ufologist by throwing him out of a flying saucer 35 feet up in the air, nor did they electrocute the Ufologist’s wife. They may have constructed the crop circle in the cornfield, but I say this because you’re never given an explanation for where the crop circle came from, despite there being a perfectly good suspect (and red herring) in the form of the hostile, shotgun-toting farmer who owns that cornfield.

Let’s back up to when Gréco is first confronted by the possibility of flying saucers and is dumbfounded by Blum’s starry-eyed belief.

A report arrives at the police station. A crop duster has seen from the air what can’t be seen from the ground. There’s a crop circle in a cornfield. It’s easily 30 or more feet across, and it’s got a body dead center. Our gang arrive and Blum is stunned when he identifies the body. It’s prominent Ufologist, Claude Lacombe. If you recognize the name, it’s because he bears the same name as the French scientist (played by notable French New Wave director François Truffaut) in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). Coincidence? I think not. The scriptwriter is teasing you.

Reviews Meurtres du 3eme Type (2021) crop circle with body inside — It is a puzzler.

Blum is convinced Lacombe was tossed out of a UFO. Why? He wants to believe and there’s no way the body could have gotten into the crop circle’s center and Lacombe died from falling 30 feet or more and hitting the ground hard. To make the crime scene more mysterious, it’s clean. There’s no massive blood splatter as you’d expect when a body is tossed out of a flying saucer and gravity takes over. There’s even a suspiciously high level of radiation above the normal background you’d expect. Plus, the corn is beautifully pressed down in concentric patterns.

Why you’d think that notorious British pranksters Doug Bower and Dave Chorley had hiked out to the cornfield, toting their wooden planks on drag-ropes and their homemade wire eyepieces attached to ballcaps (to ensure straight lines) and pressed the corn down without breaking it. Other than the body and the radiation, naturally.

Gréco refuses to believe aliens have arrived. She heads to the local TV station to investigate the corpse’s wife, Jacqueline Lacombe.

Reviews Meurtres du 3eme Type (2021) jacqueline lacombe — The tough minded producer of her husband’s UFO TV show. Think Lou Grant in a skirt.

Jacqueline’s the producer for Claude’s show about visiting aliens. She’s dumbfounded that he’s dead and immediately attributes it to aliens because of Claude’s unauthorized tell-all about his kidnapping years before. The memoir about alien probing made him famous.

The TV station staff is equally credulous but their salaries depend on them believing. As Gréco investigates, she learns that Jean-Luc, the cohost might have been romantically involved with Jacqueline (Rose thinks so); that Régis, the janitor, had lost his star soccer career when Claude ran him over; and that Yves Blanchard, the second banana wearing a NASA astronaut suit, was romancing Claude’s wife to get revenge on Claude.

Meanwhile the subplots keep the cast busy. Rose is trying to move out of her parent’s mansion and make friends (she has none? Really?), Beretta gets huffy with Gréco telling him what to do, and another level of French bureaucracy gets involved in this high-profile case and sends in Ufologist Sylvia Denaux. Beretta sees Sylvia and is smitten. Sylvia spots Rose and is smitten.

Reviews Meurtres du 3eme Type (2021) lesbian seduction — And despite smooth lines like this one.

None of them get what they want. Gréco learns that Sylvia, too, has reasons to hate Claude, but enough to murder him?

Keep watching the skies[/caption]The case becomes more and more mysterious, particularly when Gréco investigates the crop circle in the middle of the night and it glows green.

Reviews Meurtres du 3eme Type (2021) watching the skies — Then, Jacqueline is discovered dead in the same crop circle with no way that her body could have gotten there. She, however, wasn’t tossed out of the flying saucer’s bottom hatch. She was electrocuted. But, as with Claude, there’s no sign of how that happened. This was another underwritten section. When the murderer’s plot is revealed, you don’t get an explanation of how she was electrocuted.

Eventually, after explosions in the cornfield and what appears to be a flying saucer racing overhead Lille (every citizen in the provinces calls the police demanding an answer), Gréco and company discover a maze of tunnels under the cornfield.

The tunnels date back to the Great War and some of the locals know about them. Similarly, the locals know there’s plenty of unexploded ordnance lurking under the fields outside Lille from both WWI and WWII.

[caption id="attachment_19287" align="aligncenter" width="777"] Which is why you should never toss anything onto a field in France.

Reviews Meurtres du 3eme Type (2021) explosion — Then, Jacqueline is discovered dead in the same crop circle with no way that her body could have gotten there. She, however, wasn’t tossed out of the flying saucer’s bottom hatch. She was electrocuted. But, as with Claude, there’s no sign of how that happened. This was another underwritten section. When the murderer’s plot is revealed, you don’t get an explanation of how she was electrocuted.

Eventually, after explosions in the cornfield and what appears to be a flying saucer racing overhead Lille (every citizen in the provinces calls the police demanding an answer), Gréco and company discover a maze of tunnels under the cornfield.

The tunnels date back to the Great War and some of the locals know about them. Similarly, the locals know there’s plenty of unexploded ordnance lurking under the fields outside Lille from both WWI and WWII.

[caption id="attachment_19287" align="aligncenter" width="777"] Which is why you should never toss anything onto a field in France.

They also find in the tunnel a vodka flask belonging to hard-drinking Sylvia. She claims she didn’t do it, even though Claude (and not her lesbianism) is why she lost her highflying position as one of France’s first female jet pilots.

But if it wasn’t little green men, then who was it? In another favorite trope of Agatha’s, it’s the resentful, unacknowledged son. It turns out that Jean-Luc, Claude’s cohost, is also Claude’s son from a long-ago affair. When Jean-Luc learned this fact, he infiltrated the show and introduced himself.

Unfortunately for Claude, he did so while perched in his stargazing spot, 30-some feet above the ground. Claude spurned him, and Jean-Luc pushed back hard.

Then, in amazing feats of spontaneously developing a complicated plot to conceal the murder, he dragged the body through the tunnels (which he knew about because he’d grown up in the area) to the cornfield, built the crop circle, and laid out Claude’s body to be discovered. The radiation? That came from the defunct watch and clock factory Jean-Luc’s grandfather owned. Among other tidbits left over were barrels of glowing radium, suitable for painting glow-in-the-dark numbers on watches and alarm clocks. Somehow, Jean-Luc managed to spread radium around the cornfield without getting the glow on his own clothes. While changing clothes back at the station, Jacqueline recognized Jean-Luc’s birthmark as being identical to Claude’s. She realized Jean-Luc was Claude’s son, confronted him, so he murdered her too.

Reviews Meurtres du 3eme Type (2021) birthmark — Which is why you should always draw the curtains when changing.

How did he electrocute her? You’ll have to guess. Maybe aliens were involved, but it seems more likely he used some high-voltage equipment at the TV station.

It all comes together, as long as you’re willing to believe based on scanty evidence.