Review of The Woman in the Fifth

Well, it depends whether you think it really matters. The film works well as a dark and mysterious European thriller for the first two acts, but collapses in a series of unresolved dead ends in the third and final act. Ethan Hawke is excellent as the shabby, messed up novelist Tom Ricks, and KST vamps it up as his imaginary lover, but she really doesn't get enough screen time. The story is an enigma, the end suggests (and I haven't read the novel) that much of what has occurred is a figment of Ricks' psychosis. We know he's probably been in prison or hospital (or both) and Hawke plays him as a man on the edge, with his rage bubbling under all the time. But what is Ricks' reality is impossible to say by the end as nothing really makes sense, as there is no real denouement to the story - there is no final resolution or clarification of what has gone on or what is going on.

An interesting Euro Thriller which ultimately does not satisfy.