The Mystery of Henri Pick

The Mystery of Henri Pick (Le Mystère Henri Pick, 2019) is a French comedy-drama you can watch online on iFILM. Inside a Breton library devoted to rejected, never-published manuscripts, a young editor stumbles on a novel she's convinced is a masterpiece and rushes it into print. Overnight it becomes a sensation.

The trouble is its supposed author: Henri Pick, a local pizza cook who died two years earlier and who, by his widow's account, never read a book or wrote anything longer than a grocery list. None of it adds up for Jean-Michel Rouche, a stubborn literary critic who sets out to expose the whole thing as a hoax. Teaming up with Pick's daughter Joséphine, he digs for the real hand behind the manuscript. Fabrice Luchini plays the critic with his trademark dry bite, opposite Camille Cottin.

Directed by Rémi Bezançon from David Foenkinos's novel, it's a light, charming whodunit about books and vanity where the question of authorship matters more than any chase. One for fans of talky, witty French cinema. Stream The Mystery of Henri Pick (2019) online on iFILM.