Micolas Klotz’s film was called La Question Humaine in France, and that’s a more suitable title for this highly intelligent metaphysical thriller about a young psychiatrist attached to a Franco-German corporation who is asked to spy on his boss. The older man is said to be on the verge of a serious breakdown and, if he is, he must be dispensed with.

The psychiatrist is Mathieu Amalric and the boss is veteran Michel Lonsdale, two of France’s best actors, and the sparring between them is alone worth the price of admission. But Klotz’s view of the corporate lifestyle, which trains its employees to be young savages, and uses euphemisms such as “downsizing” to cover wholesale redundancies when things go badly, is both intricate and fascinating.

Halfway through the film the director posits an even worse scenario, virtually accusing the corporation and its leaders of using the same language as the Nazis did in delicately describing the Holocaust and its methods as wholesale “cleansing”.

If Klotz sometimes seems to be stretching his points too far, there is no doubt that this is a highly original and often stunning film from a director who takes a considerable number of risks, most of which come off. There is no better foreign-language fiction film in London at the moment.