Benoît Jacquot's strange, mesmerizing Seventh Heaven explores the dynamics of a modern marriage but unfolds like a suspense thriller, treating the most peculiar human behavior like clues to a deep and in many ways inscrutable mystery. In appearance a healthy, well-to-do young wife and attentive mother, Sandrine Kiberlain wanders around Paris all day as if in a trance, given to compulsive shoplifting and frequent fainting spells. At a party, she encounters an eccentric therapist (François Berléand) who takes her on as a patient and radically alters her life in a few sessions, using hypnotism and feng shui, an Eastern practice that finds harmony in the art of placement. ("If you continue sleeping to the Southeast," he warns her, "be prepared to suffer the consequences.") But as she literally puts things in order, her domineering husband (Vincent Lindon) begins to feel jealous and powerless, and their marriage is thrown off balance. Seventh Heaven doesn't resolve itself as neatly as its plot description would suggest. Jacquot's puzzle structure, which recalls Michelangelo Antonioni (especially L'Avventura) and Atom Egoyan (Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter), gives the film its eerie allure, but the pieces don't always fit together. That Jacquot embraces this ambiguity, which is only heightened by uniformly nuanced and low-key performances, makes Seventh Heaven especially absorbing.