Bastards (Les Salauds) – review

Claire Denis has created a menacing and atmospheric neo-noir, as headspinning in its way as The Big Sleep. It isn't there to be watched and understood in the conventional sense, but experienced or inhaled. Denis has once again commissioned a pulsing original score by Tindersticks that enhances the disquieting mood. Vincent Lindon, a star in the old school of charismatic French masculinity, plays Marco. He is a sea-captain who returns to France when he hears his sister is in trouble. Her husband has committed suicide, driven to despair by debt repayments to a shadowy businessman (Michel Subor) – and also, apparently, by allowing this man to abuse his teenage daughter (Lola Creton) in lieu of cash. So for revenge, Marco sets out to seduce the man's mistress Raphaelle (Chiara Mastroianni) and mother of his infant son. In the course of this film's chaotically disordered narrative structure, a terrible revenge appears also to be planned against this little boy, but who carries it out is left a mystery up to the final credits and beyond. It is macabre and dreamlike; the deadpan preposterousness is tricky to negotiate, but leaves behind an oily residue of unease when you have awoken from the nightmare.