Two nurses, Jane and Cathy, go on a cycling holiday through rural France. After they have been cycling for a while Cathy wants to stop and relax, but Jane wants to press on. Jane thinks that Cathy only wants to linger in the hope of meeting a man on a scooter who she had seen at various points along their journey so far. They argue, and Jane cycles on to the next village, leaving Cathy to sunbathe at a small clearing in some woods.
Cathy wakes from a sleep, but becomes scared after she hears a sound in the bushes and discovers her bicycle has been vandalised. Meanwhile, Jane is disturbed by a squabbling couple at the café where she is resting, and cycles back to the woods to find her friend only to find she is no longer there. As time goes by we become convinced that Cathy is genuinely missing and we encounter various other individuals, all of whom seem suspicious to some degree: an ex-pat middle-aged Englishwoman, a gendarme, and the gendarme's deaf father.
Although the pacing is fairly slow the tension is ratcheted up quite efficiently. Ultimately, however, I found the ending a bit disappointing. For much of the film the man on the scooter, who claims to be a member of the Surité, is supposedly helping Jane find Cathy, but he behaves so strangely that she becomes afraid of him and runs away. Towards the end of the film Jane finds Cathy's dead body, but the man on the scooter turns out not to be the killer and comes to her rescue at a crucial moment. However, we never get any explanation for his odd behaviour earlier on.
Cathy wakes from a sleep, but becomes scared after she hears a sound in the bushes and discovers her bicycle has been vandalised. Meanwhile, Jane is disturbed by a squabbling couple at the café where she is resting, and cycles back to the woods to find her friend only to find she is no longer there. As time goes by we become convinced that Cathy is genuinely missing and we encounter various other individuals, all of whom seem suspicious to some degree: an ex-pat middle-aged Englishwoman, a gendarme, and the gendarme's deaf father.
Although the pacing is fairly slow the tension is ratcheted up quite efficiently. Ultimately, however, I found the ending a bit disappointing. For much of the film the man on the scooter, who claims to be a member of the Surité, is supposedly helping Jane find Cathy, but he behaves so strangely that she becomes afraid of him and runs away. Towards the end of the film Jane finds Cathy's dead body, but the man on the scooter turns out not to be the killer and comes to her rescue at a crucial moment. However, we never get any explanation for his odd behaviour earlier on.