Who killed Oliver Lacat (Jean-Claude Rolland)? The Second Twin is a strange film that manages to fold suspect, investigator and lawyer all into one person, Pierre Montaud (Robert Hossein). Meanwhile, director Christian-Jaque’s 1966 whodunit serves up distinctive visuals as it plays with suspects, as if this were an expressionist film from the 1930s, but in searingly vivid colour.
Why it’s called The Second Twin I don’t know. The original French title is La Seconde Vérité, which translates as The Second Truth, something the alternate English title, The Other Truth, gets nearer to. Is there a second twin? I don’t remember seeing one, or even a suggestion of one, but then cards are being kept close to chests in this movie, which reveals everything in its final seconds.
There are two styles in play. One is nervy with a jerky camera, as in the film’s opening moments when a close-up of a barking dog draws attention to a dead man lying on the ground, most of the body out of shot but the situation clear.
The second style we get later on. With the paranoia dialled down a touch, the chief players are introduced in flashback, in a swinging French discotheque, where trainee doctor Nathalie (Michèle Mercier) DJs to pay her way through medical school. Here, celebrated lawyer Pierre first claps eyes on her, and is entranced. Meanwhile, his piercing grey eyes glowering in the background, Olivier looks on as the older man charms his ex-girlfriend out of the DJ booth and makes his play.
Two storylines too. One is the murder whodunit, plain and simple. It seems obvious that it was Pierre who killed Olivier, but Pierre is adamant it wasn’t him. As the evidence mounts against him he is eventually forced into becoming an investigator to prove himself innocent. The other is Pierre and Nathalie’s increasingly fraught relationship, suave and debonair Pierre with a wife he won’t leave, Nathalie with her future ahead of her unwilling to be Pierre’s mere plaything. He gets weaker, she gets stronger.
Christian-Jaque (birth name Christian Maudet) spends way too much time on the push-me-pull-you of Pierre and Nathalie’s relationship but does at least paint a convincing picture of a man losing his head (his mind?). The film really picks up power after Pierre goes on trial in the headline-grabbing case, is acquitted on a technicality and then sets off on his quest to prove his innocence, though the social media of the era (bricks through his car window, abusive phone calls) is convinced he did it.
So many canted camera angles, so much angst from Pierre. It’s noir with all the lights on, really, and Hossein plays his character as a noirish male unmanned not by a woman – Nathalie is one of the few people in this film to come out it well – but his uncontrollable feelings for her.
It’s hard to feel for him, though, which is one of the reasons the film just doesn’t work, for all its superbly tense looks. Hossein is probably best known for Rififi but can’t get a sympathetic handle on Pierre. Meanwhile, what little sight we get of Olivier tells the same story again, a male lost to his urges. The French do love a crime passionel, which is, at bottom, what this story is.
Fabulous visuals, less convincing psychologicals, it starts out looking like a forgotten gem but eventually it slightly wears out its welcome and by the time all is revealed I didn’t care very much about the who, the what and the how, ingenious though the dénouement is.
Jacques Loussier’s atonal, 1950s-noir score is interesting, especially if you only associate him with his jazzed-up versions of Bach. In fact the film is full of interesting stuff – performances, looks, sounds. Even the location, Dijon rather than Paris, is fascinating and refreshing. But The Second Twin ultimately isn’t greater than the sum of its parts and, for all its gorgeous looks, in the end that’s all that counts.
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
