French film The Translators sets Agatha Christie-style whodunnit in the book industry.

The theft of a best-selling author’s unpublished manuscript sets off this glossy French whodunnit, a thriller with a nightmarish vision of freelance hotdesking that could easily have been a black comedy.

The suspects are the book’s translators, holed up in what amounts to a luxurious bunker beneath a French chateau, complete with a five-star chef, swimming pool and bowling alley.

They’ve signed on to live and work in this lavish lockdown for a greedy publisher named Eric (Lambert Wilson), who stands to lose squillions if there’s a leak, and has consequently deployed armed guards, confiscated phones and disabled the internet.

But leak it does, and Eric stops at nothing to uncover the culprit.

In this regard, the trilogy’s mysterious and publicity-shy novelist — a kind of French, male version of Elena Ferrante — is one of Roinsard’s more interesting ideas. It leads us to a white-haired bookseller in Normandy (Patrick Bauchau), who looks upon the world from his tiny shop with jaded suspicion (this isn’t a spoiler, the film is up front about his identity early on).