AllMovie

The unexplained disappearance of a handful of students touches the lives of their peers in unexpected ways in this low-key drama, the first feature from writer and director Fabrice Gobert. Werner (Laurent Delbecque) is a teenager attending Lycee Leon Blum on the suburban fringes of Paris in 1992. When Werner goes missing, his friends become increasingly concerned with the passage of time, and his former girlfriend (Ana Girardot) and two of his pals (Audrey Bastien and Jules Pelissier) begin playing private eye, trying to pull together the sketchy evidence in hopes of solving the mystery of Werner's disappearance. Before long, the three are joined by two of their classmates, an eccentric preppie (Arthur Mazet) and a disaffected punk rocker (Selma El Mouissi), but the puzzle grows more complicated when the new arrivals to the group also vanish, and a dead body turns up in the woods. Simon Werner a Disparu . . . (aka Lights Out) features an original score by venerable alternative rock band Sonic Youth; the film debuted at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival.