Rivette's tightly wound images turn the ornate architecture of Paris into a labyrinth of intimate entanglements and apocalyptic menace; he evokes the fearsome mysteries beneath the surface ...

All this is overblown, making it pretentious, slow-moving and fairly confused. It takes much too long to tell its over-complicated story.

Rivette was perhaps more of a prognosticator than he realized, anticipating the downfall of the very movement he was involved in before it had effectively begun.

It strikes me as nothing more than an inane and aesthetically pretentious debut by Rivette, burdened by a rather clumsy narrative about existential paranoia and political conspiracies. [Full review in Spanish]