In a picturesque, isolated university town in the French Alps, a horribly mutilated corpse requires the expert skills of Paris murder investigator Pierre Niemans (Jean Reno). He quickly intuits that the torture the victim suffered is actually a message. Meanwhile, miles away, a brash young detective named Max Kerkerian (Vincent Cassel) finds himself re-examining the death of a young girl 20 years earlier after her tomb is desecrated. As the mystery surrounding the girl's death deepens, and the bodies in the Alps begin to pile up, the two men find themselves following the same set of gruesome clues to an even darker secret. There is nothing especially new in this dark intellectual thriller, but director Mathieu Kassovitz gets all he can out of the picturesque locations (some particularly breathtaking scenes were shot on top of a glacier) and the rough-edged charm of his two protagonists. Reno's Niemans, perpetually rumpled, unshaven, and always in search of a light for his cigarette, sticks out like a sore thumb as he methodically conducts his investigation among the well-scrubbed students and faculty of the elite, strangely insular university where the murders are taking place. Cassel's hot-headed Kerkerian, on the other hand, likes to smoke a little dope while he's on duty and isn't above stealing cars or Kung-fuing a pack of skinheads into submission when he has to. If the film has one flaw, it's a somewhat confusing plot twist at the end, but otherwise, Les Rivieres Pourpres is a well-made and suitably engrossing thriller.