While this was directed and written by Brian De Palma, this is an English-language remake of Alain Corneau’s 2010 thriller film Love Crime with a different ending. It’s an erotic thriller but you know, it’s also very much a thriller. Or a giallo. Or what De Palma does best, you know?

Christine Stanford (Rachel McAdams, Mean Girls) is an American advertising exec in Germany, working on a smartphone campaign with her Isabelle (Noomi Rapace, who played Lisabeth Sanders in the original Dragon Tattoo movies). Christine ends up taking the credit for their idea, which is well-received, but she never apologizes. Instead, she confides how her twin sister — oh man, De Palma hitting all his notes — died. But that’s when Isabelle’s assistant Dani (Karoline Herfurth) convinces her to upload her own version of the ad which soon goes viral.

Christine drops a bomb on her former protege by leaking a sex tape of Isabelle having an affair with her husband Dirk (Paul Anderson), which causes her to have a nervous breakdown, crash her car, go into a depression and start abusing drugs. She doesn’t stop, as she tries to get both Dani and Isabelle fired using blackmail from a threatening letter written on Isabelle’s computer.

So when Christine dies, is it any surprise that the police jail Isabelle? She confessed while high, plus there’s that revenge letter and evidence of a scarf’s fibers on the dead body. But how could that happen when Isabelle was at the ballet? Maybe it was really Dirk, who has the actual bloody scarf in his car.

The end of this movie is like having an entire chum bucket of red herrings and twist endings all dumped on you at the same time and I love every minute of it. It’s ridiculous but also you can nearly hear De Palma laughing as he puts up on the screen.

Rapace and Adams arrived in Berlin a week before shooting started to rehearse the screenplay and had a lot of suggestions for the relationship of the characters, including making the lesbian subtext actual text. De Palma was a bit overwhelmed with changing the screenplay and also prepping the shooting, so Natalie Carter, who co-wrote Love Crime, came in to work with the actresses to add their new scenes.

This is the seventh movie that Pino Donaggio did with De Palma. The others are Carrie, Home Movies, Dressed to Kill, Body Double, Blow Out, Raising Cain and Domino.