Sans répit skilfully jumps back and forth between morbid absurdism and hard-hitting action ★★★☆☆

How much bad luck can you have as a corrupt police officer? Very unlucky, so notices officer Thomas (Franck Gastambide) in the French action thriller sans repitreleased here as restless† On his way to the night vigil of his recently deceased mother, Thomas drives to the death of an important drug criminal, after which he only knows one way to hide the corpse: in Mama’s coffin.

The widely reported scene in which he does it is the highlight of this Netflix remake of the South Korean A Hard Day (2014). Mother and Mafioso are barely underground when Thomas receives a call from an even more villainous cop (Simon Abkarian), who begins to blackmail him with sadistic pleasure. That cat-and-mouse game unfortunately ends up dead, instead of becoming the explosive denouement that all the feverish stuff suggests. Yet debutant Régis Blondeau has made a nice snack out of it, skilfully jumping back and forth at the right moments between morbid absurdism and hard-hitting action.