Frantic by Roman Polanski 1988

Dr.Richard Walker and his wife are going to Paris for a medical congress. When they arrive at the hotel in Paris they get freshened up. At the moment Richard Walker is taking a shower his wife is talking to him but he can’t hear her, when he gets out of the shower his wife is gone. That’s where the nightmare begins.

Without speaking a word of French Walker starts to look for his wife in the hotel and surroundings but no such luck. He calls the police and files a report but they don’t take him seriously.
Walker decides to try and find his wife by himself. He starts with the suitcase that his wife took with her at the airport which appears to be the suitcase of someone else. He starts looking through it in the hope that he will find a clue. He finds a box of matches from the blue parrot with the name DeDe written in it and a phone number. He calls the number but he gets an answering machine. He decides to go to the bar “the blue parrot” to see if anyone knows DeDe. There he finds out that DeDe is a cocaine dealer and he ends up with his home address. He decides to go there in the middle of the night and finds the appartment with an unlocked door. He walks into the appartment and he sees DeDe lying on the floor with a bullet through his head.

He takes the answering machine tape out of the machine (where he left his message)and he runs out off the apartment. He decides to stay in the building to see if someone is coming to see DeDe. Then after a while Michelle turns up. She is the girl who brought the suitcase into the country. She walks into the apartment and finds DeDe dead, when she runs out of the apartment Walker grabs her and tells her that he probably has her suitcase at his hotel.
Michelle brings Walker to her house and then they take the car to Walker’s hotel.
Michelle still wants her 10000 francs for taking the suitcase with her to France so she teams up with Walker.
This is where they decide to work together and to find his wife.

I think Michelle is the most interesting creation in the film. Half-child, half-woman, half-sophisticated, half-naive, she's drawn to Richard because she has a warm heart, but it has a glaze of ice. Several times she gets them both into trouble by demanding the payment for smuggling she feels she deserves.

Every scene of this film feels like a project from Polanski's heart, a film to prove he is capable of generating the kind of suspense he is famous for. And every scene, on its own, seems to work.