La Maison Assassinee (The Murdered House)

It's a dark and stormy night in a small French village, circa 1896, when three men apparently break into a roadside inn and slaughter the entire family, save a 3-week-old boy in his cradle.

This pre-credits sequence in "La Maison Assassinee," or, "The Murdered House," which is mercifully off-camera, is the set-up. After the credits, the story picks up some 24 years later as a stranger wanders into town — yep, you guessed it, the surviving baby all grown up.

Seraphin Monge is a World War I veteran now, already carrying more than his share of emotional scars, when he returns to his birthplace to find out the truth about his family's death.

But it's going to be neither easy nor pleasant, as most of the townsfolk are clearly not happy to see him. And it probably doesn't help that Seraphin is a bit dour and curt.

When he gets a job as a local road repairman, he becomes friendly with the old man he works with, and two young women in the village begin to pursue him romantically. And later he is befriended by another outcast. But no one else in town wants anything to do with him — and the fathers of the two young women forbid their daughters to see him . . . not that it stops them.

When he's not working, Seraphin spends his time taking out his frustrations on the house where his family was murdered, which has been abandoned all these years and is, naturally, considered to be haunted. He burns all the furniture and begins knocking down the walls.

Eventually, the film becomes a bona fide murder mystery, as Seraphin comes to believe that three foreign railroad workers who were executed for the killings were actually innocent. And when Seraphin finds evidence that three prominent local citizens had motives, it lends impetus to his personal investigation, leading him to plot revenge.

None of this is handled in the way you might expect, however. "The Murdered House" is far from your typical murder-and-revenge tale and not just because of the period setting. Director/co-writer Georges Lautner has woven a complicated tale, with many characters and lots of subplots, but somehow manages to keep the film from ever seeming overly complex.

Although there are plenty of surprises, more intriguing than the mystery itself are the characters (portrayed by an excellent cast), a wide variety of types, any number of whom might be able to fill out an entire movie themselves. The real balancing act here is keeping the audience interested in each of them, a job Lautner handles very well.

"The Murdered House" though unrated, would doubtless get an R for a sex scene; there is also some violence, a nude scene and a couple of profanities.