Plot holes 'major'?
Hey, watched the movie last night and I have to say I’m surprised to see so many write that the premise itself was illogical or that it required massive suspension of disbelief or revealed too few clues to be satisfying to the viewer. Unraveling Margot’s strange history was sufficient to plant the suspicion that she may be complicit in the killings and her father’s hostility sufficient to suggest he knew more than he was willing to let on. It leaves a lot unsaid in regards to the details of how evidence is faked and why a specific course of action is taken, but I thought that this is an exceptional situation. The villains in this story are not only resourceful and ruthless; they are also incredibly well-connected and incredibly corrupt with a very extensive reach. I found it interesting to consider all the proposed plot holes but in most cases I returned to my original conclusion that the story was logical. Am I completely out there? A few “plot holes” that supposedly undermine the plot and my thoughts below:
Why does the father not simply alert Margot to the hit? Why does he risk waiting until she is captured to save her?
Margot’s father cannot simply sabotage the hit. Neuville will simply come after Margot again. It is crucial that Margot, Alex and Neuville all believe a hit occurred almost as planned. Alex and Neuville should believe that Margot is dead, while Margot must believe that Alex is dead. With Alex dead, she has no reason to remain in France and every reason to go. Therefore, Margot’s father must not only create the illusion that Margot is dead, but he must separate her from her husband long enough to make his death appear plausible. Lastly, he must hide his own involvement. So the hit must begin as planned. Only after Margot and Alex are separated can he interfere and the first gunman has been shot is it safe to intervene and shoot the second.
Why is evidence of drug addiction never investigated? How is the father able to remove the photos from the autopsy report without getting caught?
He is clearly a very powerful man and no stranger to corrupt practices. He has already identified the body. The police force already directs their suspicion towards Alex and the serial killer. It is fantastical but not impossible that he would take advantage of this situation and use his means to suppress this evidence. The alternate explanation is that her experimentation with drugs is not considered relevant and the system too corrupt or too bloated with bureaucracy to catch the missing photographs.
How can Margot spend years without knowledge of her husband’s existence? Does she neither read her own obituary nor follow the investigation of her alleged murder?
I say it's possible. At this point, she has broken off all contact with family and friends. Google has yet to be invented in 1997 and establish the following and popularity it carries today. Even if she were to search for her husband in the years after, he possesses a relatively common name and has since changed his residence and employment. He had only just completed his medical training at the time of her disappearance and so there is no indication that Margot would be familiar with the pediatric hospital at which he works 8 years later. A search engine would return a number of hits. Even if Margot were to find Alex contact information though his place of work, we do not know if it would provide enough information to identify the itself as that of her husband. Some hospitals provide photographs and biographies of their staff but some don’t.
Digitized news media is available, yes, but is less extensive and widely read than it is today. Margot and Alex appear to live in a relatively small and isolated community at the time. If the paper in which her obituary is published and in which his obituary is expected to appear is merely a small local paper, she might not find either online nor expect to. As far as news coverage, I admit, this would receive some coverage but not necessarily the sort of overwhelming international notoriety we might expect. To use an example, the Craigslist killer story was big on the news when I left the U.S. for Italy but virtually non-existent abroad, and that was months ago, not years. If Margot were living in Madrid and soon after Buenos Aires, it seems conceivable that such news would escape her.
People argue that she would follow the case simply to hear her husband’s name among the victims and then realize he “survived” her or would hear her own name among the victims, but I’m not sure. Is she aware of the lengths her father went to make her death resemble the work of a serial killer? Would she necessarily become aware? Even in the most high profile cases, the number of victims is often heard far more than the names of the victims themselves. Unless the serial killer really limited his activity to her neighborhood alone (and we don’t have evidence that he did) I’m not sure “Serial Killer in France” would really be enough to pique her interest and shake her out of her grief long enough to pay attention. Maybe this requires some suspension of disbelief but not the huge leap people make it out to be.
Why does Margot not contact Alex by mail or phone? Why 8 years later?
It’s 2006. The case has been reopened and become larger in scope. This time it is more difficult to escape the news. Suddenly, Margot realizes her husband is still alive. The news provides his current whereabouts, thus making him easy to contact. However, she is smart enough to know that reopening the case of her death makes the world more dangerous for her: Neuville is also certainly monitoring her husband. This may extend to intercepting his mail, maybe even his monitoring his phone calls. A simple letter or email is too easily disregarded as a hoax or a cruel prank, but sending so much as a photo carries the risk of providing Neuville with definitive proof of her survival.
Sending an email with a title that only Alex would find significant (that would appear to anyone else as spam), directing him to a password-protected site directing him to a transient low-resolution image of herself transmitted from a non-descript and evidently foreign location, warning him that they “are watching”—all appears a clever way of alerting him to the actual circumstances without leaving tangible proof of her existence.