“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”

The English playwright William Cosgreve knew what he was talking about when he penned a similar line in 1697 which, slightly misquoted, takes the form of the famous adage we know today.

Cosgreve’s quote concerns angels of a darker sort, those of the fairer sex who torment their tormentors.

Think Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction.

Kathy Bates in Misery.

Sissy Spacek in Carrie.

No matter if you’re her former lover, her favorite novelist, or her prom date, you do not want to play with a woman’s emotions.

If you do, you might just find you’ve got hell to pay.

In Michel Spinosa’s Anna M., Isabelle Carré makes her grand entrance into the Cosgreve Hall of Fame, playing a mentally disturbed young woman who falls in love with her doctor after a failed suicide attempt.

Anna, who lives a mostly solitary life working as a restorer of old literary texts, has a long, jagged scar along her right leg to remind her of her nearly fatal leap in front of a speeding car.

She treats the injury as good fortune, however, when immediately upon leaving the hospital she begins following Dr. Zanevsky (Gilbert Melki) everywhere he goes in the mistaken belief that they have a special connection.

What starts out as a harmless crush quickly advances into a dangerous and disturbing obsession that puts Carré’s Anna on a par with the all-time great ‘women scorned’ characters of cinematic history.

Carré, pretty in a plain sort of way, plays Anna as a pitiable creature in search of the same things everyone wants: acceptance, companionship, and love.

And like nearly everyone at some time in their lives, she chooses poorly.

The happily married Dr. Zanevsky shows no romantic interest in his patient, and at first does what any good doctor should do: he tries to help her.

But as Anna graduates from following him to his doorstep to stealing his mail, calling his wife, and finally invading his apartment, Zanevsky has no choice but to seek help from the police.

While Melki and Anne Consigny, who plays his wife, adequately demonstrate the appropriate gamut of emotions one would expect to see from a couple increasingly terrified by a crazy person, their roles in the film are rather bland, as is that of Anna’s mother, played by Geneviève Mnich.

The focus is squarely on the downward spiral of Carré’s Anna, as Director Spinosa eventually abandons nearly all pretext of storyline and supporting character development in his study of the declining mental state of his heroine.

When Anna repeatedly slams her head into a lamppost or lets out a primal scream alone in bed, the anguish Carré brings to the scene leaves the audience cringing, even if it cannot bring itself to take its eyes off the screen for fear of missing some guilty pleasure it can take from whatever awful calamity unfolds next.

The strength of the film – its character study of a woman descending into madness – ends up accentuating its weaknesses, though.

Just as George Lucas seeks new ways to employ CGI technology at the expense of good dialogue or Quentin Tarantino stretches the boundaries of gory fight scenes, in turn tending to deaden a spectator’s emotional investment in the story, Spinosa pushes the limits of psychosis in ways that challenge the viewer’s sensibilities and batter his senses, while sacrificing other elements that can make a good film great.

Spinosa, who also wrote the film’s screenplay, decides to basically write out the Zanevskys and instead show the increasingly unstable Anna putting herself in more and more precarious situations, endangering herself and others in the process.

While this makes for some painful yet captivating scenes, it doesn’t make for a good story, the third act collapses, and as with too many French films, the ending is weird and not really comprehensible.

Still, Carré’s performance is worth seeing, and Anna M. should not be left by her lonesome in the cinemas of France this spring, for you never know what she might do to you if you try to ignore her.

Read more of Stephen Leonard's views on Paris at http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/r_kent/, where he writes under the name R Kent.