BEWARE: These comments give away crucial elements of the plot!!! Don't read these comments unless you've seen the movie!!!

Even though I don't find the movie works well as a thriller, I am glad I watched it. Here is why:

Assume that your behavior is determined by your nature, i.e. by the genes that have been passed down to you from your parents. Is it then still possible to hold someone responsible for what he or she is doing? In other words: Why do things happen the way they happen? This is IMHO the fundamental question that Claude Chabrol asks in his latest movie Sweet Poison.

From very early on in the movie the alignment of characters is fairly obvious: A couple consisting of a femme fatale and a detached pianist, their dull son and as a twin personality the young, alert, and beautiful woman, and her mother, a doctor. Whereas the social relations between these characters are plain: couple, son, daughter, the biological relations between them are highly questionable: the son had been conceived by a woman who later on died in a car-accident; daughter and son might have been swapped on their very first day of life; the doctor conceived her child with the help of an anonymous donator of semen; the femme fatale had been adopted by her parents. This absurd number of ambiguities seems to indicate that this is really the main theme of the movie. The viewer is led to believe that the swapping actually took place and that the daughter has inherited the musical talent from the pianist, while the son inherits the dull unspecificity of his anonymous father.

All four main characters - the couple, son, and daughter - simply live out what has been given to them by nature: the father is a famous pianist, his daughter follows his foot-steps. The femme fatale (symbolically portrayed as a spider) tries to kill the women that get in between herself and the pianist (the mother of the son and the pianist's daughter). The daughter lives an interesting life, which includes playing piano. The son doesn't act at all.

The femme fatale kills the mother of the pianist's son with the help of sweet poison (reflecting the German title: Suesses Gift). When the daughter starts to interfere with the life of the couple, the femme fatale takes the exact same steps (not buying drugs, hurting her son's foot, sending the woman into town to buy drugs, mixing sleeping drugs into the woman's drink) in order to kill the daughter, too. She behaves like a spider that builds a web and immediately starts to build another one when a scientist destroys the web the spider just made: It is a built-in program that's running, not something that the wasp decides to do or not to do. When the pianist finds out about his wife's nature, he doesn't grab her by the throat or accuses her. He just asks her why she did it and then goes on to play piano. This answers the first question: If humans are driven by their nature one cannot hold them responsible for their deeds anymore. Because it is just their nature and they cannot help it.

However, when the femme fatale tries to kill a woman who is close to the pianist the second time around, she fails. Her plan goes the same way as the first time. Whether she succeeds or fails depends on chance, i.e. circumstances that lie beyond her influence, like better car technology. What determines the outcome of things then - the second question - is not human will or drive, but random chance. It is nothing but luck whether things work out or not, if we assume that it is all in our nature/genes.

Jeanne (Anna Mouglalis)discovers she may have been swapped accidentally at birth---although everyone denies it and downplays it. Her father if the swap occurred would have been Andre Polanski (Jacques DeTrone) both of them are pianists so it seems to fit--but no one is taking it too seriously except Polanski's wife Mika (Isabelle Huppert). She is not amused.

We find out as the story unfolds that she drugged Polanski's first wife causing a car wreck in which she died. This dead woman would have been Jeanne's mother if a swap occurred and they look just alike--same receding chin etc...

Enough of the story. As another reviewer noted this is a yuppiefied upper middle class tour de force with fake piano playing and everyone is a Doctor or in the Arts (or rich).

My problems with this movie: It is goes nowhere; Jeanne knows Mika drugs and possibly poisons rivals 15 minutes into the movie but in the next hour and half of movie time she eats and drinks everything and agrees to stay at their house for 2 days and drive a car after drinking spiked coffee. Nothing happens!

The denouement is meaningless... I liked the reviewer who said Detrone is like a zombie---how true--I even thought a zombie who looks a little campy with plucked eyebrows. In the denouement nothing happens...Detrone the Zombie confronts Huppert about the drugging and death of his first wife in a deadpan non-emotional manner and then sort of shrugs and goes to playing the piano after also learning his son and Jeanne have been in an accident that very night. Huppert starts crying and then the movie credits start rolling and it ends.

Like the reviewer who said Claude Chabrol produces so many films that most of them are chaff.... how true of this one. Chabrol needs to retire. Almost all creative people: authors artists musicians directors etc... peak with a half dozen or so really good works and then burn out. At best endlessly repeating themselves...at worst producing really bad stuff.

3 or 4 stars out of 10...There are so many better films of this genre-- try The Double Hour.

Both Huppert and Chabrol are prolific and last year they worked together yet again on a movie light years ahead of this one but when one is prolific one is playing the percentages and winds up with a high chaff to wheat ratio as both have done here. Perhaps most risible is the scene towards the end that appears to be Chabrol's version of the heroine walking the corridors of the Gothic castle at three in the morning wearing only a negligee and armed only with a candle in the full knowledge that there are murderers, maniacs, vampires, perm any one from three, on the loose. Chabrol's take on this is to have a young girl volunteer to drive the car of her hostess along a winding road at night in the full knowledge that the hostess has drugged her drink. Realistically all she had to do was let the hostess, Huppert, drive herself to the pharmacy to collect a prescription, or even, if it comes to that, let the chauvinistic husband (Dutronc) pick up his own prescription. This is but one in a series of plot holes that may well be symbolised by the cobweb shawl Huppert is knitting throughout. Children swapped at birth (well, it was good enough for Shakespeare, Chabrol may argue), one of them the child of a forensic lab owner with a boyfriend working there, so convenient for testing possible toxins the spider-woman may be lacing the drinks with. More? How about this: confronted by a strange girl who claims she may be his daughter Dutronc goes from 'you must be mad' to 'come and play a little four-hand piano with me' in minutes.

The colors are of that strangely muted type that Chabrol seems to have made his own, the two young actors clearly came in a flat-pack from IKEA and there's a lack of interaction throughout. Isabelle Huppert's Mika runs the gamut from cold-blooded murderess to charming hostess hitting all the stops along the way whilst Jacques Dutronc appropriately turns in a Johnny-One-Note performance. Not one that either Chabrol or Huppert would want to feature prominently on their CVs.