Rock Paper Scissors (French: Roche papier ciseaux) is a 2013 Canadian thriller film[3] from Québec directed by Yan Lanouette Turgeon, which he co-wrote with André Gulluni.

[4] Lanouette Turgeon's debut feature is the story of three men—Boucane (Samian), Lorenzo (Remo Girone), and Vincent (Roy Dupuis)—whose lives are brought together through a strange sequence of events.

Vincent, a doctor stripped of his medical license, works for the Chinese mafia, treating a clientele of thugs he secretly despises, while managing the organization's pharmaceutical needs.

Lanouette Turgeon and Gulluni had a hard time categorizing the film's genre themselves, the director saying the phrase "dark fairy-tale" (fable noire) came up at one point, because it corresponds well to the conventions of the thriller, and because while their past short film collaborations have also been quite dark, Rock Paper Scissors has a lighter side to it due to the presence of the element of random chance (le hasard).

[11] The idea for the Aboriginal story was occurred shortly after Lanouette Turgeon met Algonquin rapper Samian at a film festival in France in 2005.

[15] The character was inspired directly from his own life: like Boucane, Samian left the First Nations reserve of Pikogan (near Amos) with a sack on his back to try his luck in Montréal, working regular jobs before making his name in music.

[16] Funding for Rock Paper Scissors was secured in May 2011,[16] in large part due to the involvement of star Roy Dupuis, who said that when he finds a project that strikes him as a piece of auteur cinema, he uses his influence to see to it the film gets made.

[4] The film was shot with a projection ratio of 1:2.35, with the support of DCP and HDCAM SR.[18] Ramachandra Borcar's score features music ranging from orchestral pieces for strings and brass instruments, to guitars and female vocals reminiscent of spaghetti Westerns, Chinese musical instruments, flamenco guitar, and electronic music, performed by thirty musicians including Richard White, Jonathan Cummins, Mikey Heppner, Lowell Campbell, Liu Fang, Phil Hornsey, and Borcar himself playing an array of rare electronic instruments like the swarmatron, modified omnichords and VCS3.

[21] Of particular significance is a selection from his Pavane, which plays during a key emotional moment: it is a piece which haunted Lanouette Turgeon during the eight years of work on the project, and for him, is inseparable from the character of Lorenzo.

[2] Shirley Noel calls the film daring and finds the script and its actors believable, and wishes that Samian and Léger's characters could have had a road movie feature on their own.

[10] Malcolm Fraser, writing for Cult MTL, says the director has a good command of suspense and atmosphere, opining that the film is at its best "in its quiet moments; the plot with Samian and Léger is the strongest, with the relationship between the two men building slowly and subtly".

The acting is exceptional, the camera work imaginative, and the sets alternately wonderfully kitsch or blood-curdling, while Ramachandra Borcar's score, here classical, there exotically themed, keeps the action going without overwhelming it.

[13] Brendan Kelly, writing for the Montreal Gazette, assigns the film 3.5 stars, stating at the start that while it is "by no means a perfect film", he admires its ambition and found many brilliant moments reminiscent of Quentin Tarantino at his best, while the "many fine actors" are "at the top of their game"; "things go a little bit off the rails in the late going, but up until then Lanouette Turgeon does a bang-up job of juggling these various narrative threads, and the drama has real emotional force.

[8] Jonathan Quesnel says the debut feature is done with panache, style and talent, borrowing here and there from, say, Wong Kar-wai or the Cohen Brothers, depicting a tableau of dark human despair with stunning aplomb; but the multiplicity of genres is also the film's weakness, undermining its coherence and integrity with so many stylistic nods to so many of the director's beloved films, rendering the tone uneven and less hard-hitting than it could be in the end.