“Just the Two of Us” is a textbook domestic abuse melodrama, a French film with just enough mystery about it to make us wonder if it will transform into a thriller.

Based on a novel by Éric Reinhardt, Valérie Donzelli’s movie tells the story of a love affair, marriage and its breakdown from the woman’s point of view.

Virginie Efira from “Madeleine Collins” and “Benedetta” is Blanche, who meets the handsome and rakishly-named Grégoire Lamoureux (Melvin Poupaud of “Jeanne du Barry”) at a party her twin sister (Efira again) is throwing.

Actually, they “meet again.” They went to school together. He used to be “fat,” he says, as if such creatures ever turn up in French films. He’s tall, dark and handsome, a smoker with a name so poetic sounding she keeps repeating it.

He cultivates an air of mystery, but insists “Lamoureux” the banker “doesn’t want to keep secrets from” Blanche the high school French teacher. He quotes from “Brittanicus” (in French, with English subtitles), charms and seduces. A tumble into bed becomes a romance, a pregnancy and a marriage.

But the concern she expresses to her OB-GYN — “I haven’t known my partner very long.” — is our first tip that this isn’t what it seems.

He is charming, but controlling. The first lie she catches him in is a doozy. That “transfer” to a bank branch “in the boonies” far away from the coast and her family and friends wasn’t ordered. He asked for it. He wanted to get her away from her twin, her widowed mother and her school.

He doesn’t like the degree that she shares their lives with her sister.

“She’s my twin!”

“She’s not part of our relationship!”

Another baby comes, and the “control” ramps up. Her taking a job at a distant school, showing independence, isn’t his idea of a marriage.

The fact that we reconstruct much of what happens by virtue what Blance says to an interviewer (Dominique Reymond) tells us something went wrong. But is she talking to a lawyer? A counselor? A police interrogator?

The simple plot is decorated with tense moments, brittle arguments and textbook examples of manipulation and “abuse” that begin long before violence is threatened.

Efira makes Blanche understandable and sympathetic in classic “women’s melodrama” fashion. She cheats and she lies, but whatever reason she’s being “interviewed,” we trust it’s her side of the story that we will identify with.

Poupaud gives the game away by putting us on guard, right from that first seduction.

This French film never quite lapses into “Lifetime Original Movie” victimhood, but with every hint of stalking, badgering phone calls at work and every berating she endures, we know that whatever Blanche does to escape this is justified.

Still, it’d be nice if there was more to guess about, more suspense and more subtlety to the conflict. “Just the Two of Us” seems pre-ordained and predigested, with every emotion tugged at and every “trigger” and behavioral “tell” underlined so as to remove any doubt about what’s going on, who is the victim and who is to blame.

Rating: 18+, violence, sex, nudity

Cast: Virginie Efira, Melvil Poupaud, Bertrand Belin and Dominique Reymond

Credits: Directed by Valérie Donzelli, scripted by Audrey Diwan and Valérie Donzelli, based on a novel by Éric Reinhardt. A Music Box release on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:45