The Cinematheque

“Grimly beautiful … Terrifying, pitiless, inevitable.”

Manohla Dargis, New York Times

Claire Denis plumbs new depths of darkness in this polarizing 2013 neo-noir thriller, one of the French auteur’s most penetrating and, frankly, misanthropic movies. Inspired by Kurosawa Akira’s own noir transplant The Bad Sleep Well, Denis’s feel-bad film stars Vincent Lindon as Marco, a stoic sea-captain who returns to Paris upon news of his brother-in-law’s suicide. Marco’s sister suspects that her husband was driven to death by an unpaid creditor, who may also be responsible for a savage sexual assault on Marco’s teenage niece (Lola Créton, Goodbye First Love). Marco vows revenge, and uncovers a devastating web of deceit and depravity. Rife with Denis’s customary visual coups and oblique plot points, Bastards, not unlike Lynne Ramsay’s recent You Were Never Really Here, is a dreamy and disorderly whodunit that confronts the vilest corners of human behaviour.