`RED' RECALLS LE HITCHCOCK.

Byline: Glenn Whipp Film Critic

THE PSYCHOSEXUAL games at the heart of the fascinating French thriller ``Red Lights'' may or may not be a figment of the imagination of the movie's milquetoast husband, Antoine (Jean-Pierre Darroussin), who drinks double whiskeys the way Britney Spears downs Red Bulls.

Did Antoine really lose his wife, Helene (Carole Bouquet), on the way to picking up their two children at summer camp or did he lose her years earlier, when her career as a corporate lawyer overtook his as an insurance salesman, prompting passive-aggressive anger and the kind of alcoholic binges we witness from the movie's opening moments?

It's a tossup. Director Cedric Kahn, adapting Georges Simenon's novel, deliberately keeps the reality of ``Red Lights'' ambiguous, even shooting the movie's numerous nighttime road sequences in the studio. It's a decision that pays dividends, establishing both a mystery and an intense feeling of claustrophobia and tension between its embattled and embittered married couple.

The thick sense of dread is established early as Antoine and Helene leave Paris for Burgundy. Two million people are on the road. Accidents are everywhere, death around the corner. And the self-pitying Antoine has had three beers and two double whiskeys before even leaving the city.

Antoine's festering resentments toward Helene explode into road rage, along with insipid declarations that he wants to ``live like a man'' and ``be free.'' His thirst for manhood requires numerous stops at roadside taverns for replenishment. On his last detour, Helene threatens to leave if he goes into the bar. Antoine goes inside and Helene makes good on her promise, leaving a note that specifies she's taking the train the rest of the way.

Only she never arrives.

Helene's fate and its subsequent effect on Antoine can be interpreted many ways, including quite literally. Kahn has a marvelous command of the material, showing a fine facility for the elements of the genre - sound, probing camera movements, pitch-black humor - that Hitchcock fanatics have relished for years. Those who would consider the movie's ending at odds with what has come before should think again - Antoine seems happier than we've ever seen him and for reasons that are as twisted as the rural roads he's been driving.

Glenn Whipp, [phone]

glenn.whipp(at)dailynews.com

RED LIGHTS - Three and one half stars

(Not rated: language, violence)

Starring: Jean-Pierre Darroussin, Carole Bouquet.

Director: Cedric Kahn.

Running time: 1 hr. 46 min.

Playing: Laemmle's Town Center in Encino; Laemmle's Playhouse in Pasadena; Landmark's Westside Pavilion.

In a nutshell: Hitchcock fans will dig this dark French thriller. In French with English subtitles.

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Jean-Pierre Darroussin plays a hard-drinking, resentful husband who must suddenly cope with his wife's disappearance in the French thriller ``Red Lights.''