About midway through Justine Triet's fascinating, Palme d'Or-winning drama, a pair of characters are making their way down a twisty mountain road in the middle of the night. Sandra Voyter (Sandra Hüller), a novelist accused of murdering her husband, Samuel (Samuel Theis), is being driven by her lawyer, Renzi (Swann Arlaud), immediately after being sent away in tears from her 11-year-old son, Daniel (Milo Machado Graner), who must testify either for or against his mother in a couple of days. As Sandra sobs, Triet cuts from her face to a point of view shot of the road, dark and mysterious, dizzying in the headlights such that it feels as if anything can suddenly leap out of the darkness and into view. It's a strong metaphor for the film's raison d'etre, illuminating only briefly and in limited fashion, those twisty things that can come unexpectedly darting out of the human psyche.
Triet's film, part judicial procedural, part family drama, for the most part, plays down the more explosive elements of the genre -- as she has said in interviews, this is much closer, in spirit and tone, to Bergman, than, say, Costa-Gavras -- even as the case becomes a leading story throughout France, with TV tabloids and news shows opining endlessly on the myriad of ever-more-salacious details. Smartly, Triet for the most part, keeps her film within the world of the characters -- the news elements we do see are largely seen as they are being filmed on location, rather than the final product put out for broadcast -- even as the case clearly blows up into something far more magnified outside of the family itself.
As the film opens, Sandra is being interviewed at home by Zoé (Camille Rutherford), a young, pretty graduate student, wanting to gather material for her thesis. They are sitting in the middle of the floor of Sandra and Samuel's unfinished chalet somewhere high in the French Alps. As the two women talk, with Sandra being openly flirtatious with her guest, an unseen Samuel is on the floor above them, putting insulation against the sharply slanted walls of the unfinished attic, so they might rent out the space, and help alleviate some of their financial woes.
As the interview begins in earnest, however, Samuel keeps playing a loop of music (an instrumental version of 50 Cent's "P.I.M.P.") at ear-splitting levels, rendering the interview impossible. It is incredibly frustrating to watch, but Sandra seems to take it entirely in stride. She doesn't call up to her husband; she sits with Zoé with a slightly wry smile on her face. Their interview spoiled, Zoé leaves, and our focus turns to Daniel, the couple's son, who due to an accident when he was very young, is visually impaired. He goes outside with his (fabulous) dog, Snoop, on a walk in the mountains. Upon Daniel's return, his father's body is lying in front of the house, a large pool of blood at his head.
Thus begins the inquiry: Was Samuel suicidal, as Sandra suggests, or was he pushed out of the attic in a fit of rage? The film, written by Triet and Arthur Harari, keeps the question tightly wrapped. We, as viewers, don't know any more about what actually happened than the rest of the investigators, which leaves us as quick to blame or suspect as the rest of the speculating pundits on the news. At one point, an audio recording of a fight between the couple is released to the court (Samuel was apparently working on a new literary project, recording elements of his life), and, as the film plays out the scene between them, it's one of the rare times we actually get to see a scene with Samuel alive. Up until that point, he's kept as cryptic as a pharaoh, forcing us to take Sandra's enigmatic explanations at face value.
Eventually, this leads us to the twisty mountain road scene: Daniel has decided he wants to provide some additional testimony before the court -- though what he intends to say is unknown to us -- and, as a result, doesn't want to be anywhere near his mother over the weekend. Instead, he wants to stay in seclusion with his court-appointed officer, Marge (Jehnny Beth), and emotionally prepare himself for what he's about to tell the court (and the rest of the country) about his parents.
Despite its machinations to the contrary, it's not a mystery story in the sense that a case can be solved one way or the other: There are no moments of revelation here that finally offer up a definitive view of what happened and why. Rather, Triet's film offers us a different type of mystery -- that of the human consciousness -- that allows for many different sorts of interpretations. Like the unfinished chalet, with its stunning backdrop of mountains, and oft inaccessible road, things get more problematic the deeper we go into Sandra and Samuel's relationship. Was he outraged and devastated by her cheating on him? Was she fed up with his whining about the choices he made to move them from London back to his hometown in France? Could either of these things have been the catalyst that led to his death, either by his own hand, or his wife's?
The cast is impeccable, from Hüller's inscrutable sardonics, to Graner's heartbreaking turn as a child forced to make a choice between devastating paths, to Messi, the adorable border collie who plays Snoop (and who won the unofficial "Palm Dog" award at Cannes). They share a lived-in quality that adds much of the emotional gravity of the film, raising the stakes, as it were, even as Triet's treatment shies away from overt dramatics.
It's the director's commitment to eschew many of the trappings of its form that makes the film so resonant: We spend a good deal of time with the remains of this family, their relationships splayed out before us and meticulously examined as a science student might view a frog on a vivisection board, but, by the end, we seem to know as essentially little about them as when we began. Like the frog, there was once a living thing in front of us; in death, all we can see are the different, now inert, parts.