The Stone Council

The Stone Council (2006) is a French-German thriller you can stream online on iFILM — directed by Guillaume Nicloux, with Monica Bellucci and Catherine Deneuve, adapted from Jean-Christophe Grangé's novel Le Concile de Pierre.

Translator Diane Siprien (Bellucci) adopted a Mongolian boy named Liu years ago. Then a strange mark appears on the boy's chest. A digital recorder catches him speaking a dialect no linguist can place. A car crash puts Liu in a coma. A German doctor whose intentions are never quite clear tells Diane the answer lies in Mongolia. There she learns that Liu belongs to the nomadic Tseven people — and that practitioners of old rituals have been hunting him for use in something called the Council of Stone. Deneuve plays the head of the adoption foundation with the kind of studied calm that reads as complicity.

Grangé also wrote Crimson Rivers, and this one runs on the same engine — crime procedural on top, something more unsettling underneath. Stream The Stone Council (2006) online on iFILM.