Zapped by Lightning, a French Teacher Becomes ‘Mrs. Hyde’

As the title character of Serge Bozon’s “Mrs. Hyde” — a peculiar hybrid of science fiction, horror and comedy — Isabelle Huppert appears almost unbearably fragile. Dressed in too-long skirts and too-small sweaters, her skin preternaturally translucent and her collarbone a knife edge, she stands, frozen, in front of a classroom erupting with rowdy students. They can see her vulnerability and scent her ineptitude, and they are contemptuous.

Her real name is Madame Géquil, and she teaches physics, or tries to, at a technical school in an unnamed Parisian suburb. Even beyond her mostly nonwhite classroom, disdain for her flourishes among her fellow teachers and their pompous principal (Romain Duris), who hints darkly of termination. Things are scarcely better at home, where her cheery househusband (José Garcia) greets her with elaborately prepared meals and insultingly sexist advice. Perhaps, he suggests, she should tame her charges with her beauty?

Before she can give that a try, a storm sends a bolt of lightning into the laboratory where she’s conducting an experiment. Like Drew Barrymore’s character in “Firestarter” (1984), she can now incinerate at will. (She’s also so glowy a meddling neighbor suspects she’s having an affair.) More important, her transformation comes with teaching skills that stun her students, especially Malik (Adda Senani), a disabled Arab whose rudeness and ingratitude fail to deter her from adopting him as her protégé.

“Mrs. Hyde” might draw inspiration from Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” but its true horror lies less in a rampaging alter ego than its depiction of a culture that scorns serious thought. That notion, though — like almost every other thematic strand — is simply dangled without apparent purpose or resolution as Géquil drifts through the movie, randomly melting ice and cremating animals.

In one of several strange scenes, she follows Malik into the housing projects at night, seeming oddly fixated on the young man as he stands apart, watching fellow students enjoy a communal rap session. He’s as much of an outcast as she is; yet whenever the movie tries to say something insightful about racial integration — or education, or any number of issues — it backs off or bogs down. It’s so tonally and ideologically unfocused that its ideas just slip away.

The actors navigate this muddle as best they can. Barely emoting, Huppert displays neither personality nor agency; she’s simply a tool, first as a symbol of our contempt for learning, and later as an avenger on its behalf. Similarly, her students, are merely a collection of insubordinate behaviors, untethered to any context beyond that of the familiar classroom story whose wildlings are transformed by inspirational pedagogy.

Alone among the cast, resplendent in coordinating pastels and preening self-regard, the marvelous Duris embraces the movie’s weirdness. His director should have done the same, by retooling the original Hyde’s depravities for a woman and ejecting the script’s more ponderous moralizing. Instead, he has created a good-looking, sporadically entertaining farce whose soft, vibrant tones conceal a disappointingly empty vessel. I’m sure Bozon (who taught for three years in a suburban high school) has something useful to say about the French school system, but he doesn’t say it here.

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“Mrs. Hyde”

Not rated. In French, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes.