Movies: Merci Pour Le Chocolat

Dad is addicted to sleeping pills. His son is a pothead. The stepmother Mika (Isabelle Huppert) wanders about with a benign half-smile on her face, lacing the family’s bedtime hot chocolate with a potent–and in her hands potentially lethal–soporific. The Swiss chateau is an unlikely stoner’s paradise–and maybe, in Chabrol’s mind, a metaphor for the way the bourgeois sleepwalk around their problems. Merci pour le Chocolat occasionally succumbs to Mika’s legato rhythms, but it is more often a sly, subtle comedy about the oh-so-gentle art of murder. –By Richard Schickel