Profile
Main Feature: 7:30pm – ends at 10:02 pm
There’s a bracing and chilly atmosphere in Justine Triet’s psychothriller, about a suspicious death whose only reliable witness happens to be blind.
The Palme d’Or winner opens with a death in the French Alps. The deceased is an aspiring writer named Samuel (Samuel Theis). The suspect is his more successful wife, Sandra (the brilliant Sandra Hüller), a novelist who is a lot like her surroundings: stoic, remote and a tad frosty.
Was it an accident, or did Sandra kill him? Their son Daniel is an unreliable witness because he’s blind, the result of an accident which Sandra always blamed on Samuel, who was supposed to be looking after him at the time, and which caused Samuel to spiral into depressive anger. As the film flows from investigation to tribunal to verdict, it’s only interested in the question — not the answer.
Hüller’s calm directness is what gives the film its emotional force. She anchors it in a kind of accessible reality: we naturally sympathise with her, and yet Triet shows us that she is capable of transparent lies. It’s essential viewing.