Quartile rating: 6.5/10 · 1 rating
A well-to-do French family living in Calais deal with a series of setbacks and crises while paying little attention to the grim conditions in the refugee camps within a few miles of their home.
Michael Haneke's late-career film is a cold, precise dissection of bourgeois indifference, characteristic of his oeuvre but somewhat familiar in its thematic territory. The ensemble cast, led by Isabelle Huppert and Jean-Louis Trintignant, delivers typically restrained and commanding performances — a genuine strength. Haneke's visual style remains immaculate, with deliberate framing and a few formally inventive sequences (the smartphone video footage) that elevate the cinematography. However, the film feels like a lesser reworking of themes Haneke explored more devastatingly in earlier works, reducing its novelty. The narrative strands are handled with intelligence but don't fully cohere into something as devastating as it might have been, and the ending, while characteristically ambiguous, feels more like a shrug than a culmination.