Although it includes several more conventionally grisly moments, the real suffering in Dominik Moll's clever Hitchcockian thriller, With A Friend Like Harry, takes place in the opening scene, a picture of domestic hell that should have universal resonance. En route to their rustic vacation home in the mountains, a young family of five is crammed into an un-airconditioned station wagon on a blazing summer afternoon. The parents, sweaty and perpetually exhausted, are contending with common problems: a fussy infant with an ear infection, a bratty girl kicking the back of the driver's seat, the incessant rattle of an unaligned window. Drawing out each minor irritation to palpably agonizing effect, Moll zeroes in on the sunken, dripping face of father Laurent Lucas, who would be near the end of his rope if he weren't so pitifully beaten down. In this vulnerable state, Lucas encounters the title character at a rest-stop washroom. Harry is an old high-school classmate with a faintly sinister smirk, indelibly played by Sergi López (An Affair Of Love). While Lucas can't quite recall him from 20 years earlier, Lopez seems to remember everything, especially the overwrought poetry and fiction Lucas penned for the school's literary journal. Through flattery and persistence, López insinuates himself into Lucas' life, secretly determined to remove the distracting hassles of Lucas' wife (Mathilde Seigner) and family so he can take up writing again. The connection between the two men, which owes an obvious debt to Hitchcock's Strangers On A Train, is meant to be taken more metaphorically than literally: Wealthy and independent, with a luscious sex kitten (Sophie Guillemin) for a fiancée, López is less a real character than a raging fantasy sprung straight from the hero's id. Originally translated with the more apt title Harry, He's Here To Help, the film works best when López's excessive generosity creates subtle rifts in the family unit, like his impulsive, no-strings-attached decision to replace their broken-down station wagon with a brand-new SUV. The sharp black comedy dissipates a bit once his single-minded quest to solve all of Lucas' problems yields a high body count, leading a heady psychological thriller into more expected genre territory. But on the force of López's spookily charismatic performance alone—a scene in which he recites one of the hero's awful poems, "The Dagger In The Skin Of Night," from memory is a particular highlight—With A Friend Like Harry delights in showing an everyman's dark side run amok.