This is a made-for-TV movie with the attendant dismal image quality, and even tighter framing than TV requires. Worse, it is entirely shot in shoulder cam, using long cuts, so watching this on a big screen is like watching the waves from a rocking ship at sea. It physically makes you sick. The framing and shoulder cam are stylistic flourishes, they add no expressiveness and save no money. Likewise the constant tightness of space. Likewise, and worse still, the jump cuts that make fast action impossible to follow, and the quick pans and camera movements, turning physical moves into a soup of blurs. Moviemaking 201 for Masochist Viewers. More of the same: The Dardennes spend the thirty first minutes showing us their one central character, Olivier, working hard at furtively observing someone, we don't know whom or how many of them. Then, ba-dang, the Dardennes reveal that his target is the 16-year old who, five or six years before, murdered his young son, and has now been released to the vocational rehab school where Olivier works.
The entire film is simply one span of very bad filming of uninterpretable expressions and movements, paced by a few such ba-dang moments. Later, ba-dang, Olivier is forced to reveal to his ex-wife that he's taking the killer under his wing and, understandably, she faints into his arms. Final part - Olivier tells the murderer he's the father of his victim (about whom the punk couldn't care less). Punk runs away. Lots of obscure chasing across a wood lot. Olivier gets punk under him and his hands around punk's neck (the way the punk killed his son). Olivier releases punk. Punk runs again. Punk comes back. Ba-dang-dang, end credits, thank the Lord.
Most of the interesting stuff in life can't be filmed. Here, we have an unlikely psychological development in a man who seldom talks and automatically lies when he does, about a punk who talks even less and automatically evades when he does. There was no film to be made of that, and the Dardennes chose to make their non-film visually crummy. I saw only one film of the Dardennes' before, The Promise, which I found superb and extremely memorable. I would not have imagined that the authors would ever do anything as bad as this. As far as I can see, the positive impression others have had come from the Rorschach effect.
The entire film is simply one span of very bad filming of uninterpretable expressions and movements, paced by a few such ba-dang moments. Later, ba-dang, Olivier is forced to reveal to his ex-wife that he's taking the killer under his wing and, understandably, she faints into his arms. Final part - Olivier tells the murderer he's the father of his victim (about whom the punk couldn't care less). Punk runs away. Lots of obscure chasing across a wood lot. Olivier gets punk under him and his hands around punk's neck (the way the punk killed his son). Olivier releases punk. Punk runs again. Punk comes back. Ba-dang-dang, end credits, thank the Lord.
Most of the interesting stuff in life can't be filmed. Here, we have an unlikely psychological development in a man who seldom talks and automatically lies when he does, about a punk who talks even less and automatically evades when he does. There was no film to be made of that, and the Dardennes chose to make their non-film visually crummy. I saw only one film of the Dardennes' before, The Promise, which I found superb and extremely memorable. I would not have imagined that the authors would ever do anything as bad as this. As far as I can see, the positive impression others have had come from the Rorschach effect.